Watch Party Calendar
APRIL & MAY, 2024
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April & May, 2024
Our Surreal Midcentury
When the Atomic Age ushered in an era of exuberant hopes and unfathomable fear, reality itself became practically unbearable. Scorched by the glare of scientific progress, a few filmmakers offered a higher truth—a sur-reality—in the dreamatorium of cinema.
The midcentury visions in this month’s film series draw on the artistry of Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Man Ray and others for inspiration. Think of them as kindred spirits haunting the same region of the Imaginal.
A few shared themes:
You’ll find a common, eroticized, neo-classic visual language calling attention to memory and the permanent presence of the past. Surrealism’s fascination with the uncanny nature of the automaton is revisited, prompting us to question the nature of our own humanity. As vehicles of real-reality, fairy tales, legends and myths permeate these films. Belle et la Bête, Marnie and Belle de Jour each reimagine the tale of Beauty of and the Beast to hold up a candle to the monster of modernity without and the beast within.
May these dreamscapes ravish you with their uncanny power and beauty. Let them work their way into your psyche as, together, we wind along the precipice of promise and peril into the mid-21st century.
Tuesday, April 30
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
SPECIAL EVENT: Lecture + Movie
Marnie
Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, with Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren
Joel Gunz will introduce this 6-film series with an a slide show depicting the role of Surrealist art in midcentury cinema and culture.
Hitchcock’s most controversial film is also one of his most surreal. That’s fitting, given Marnie’s preoccupation with dreams, memory and what surrealist André Breton called l’amour fou—mad love.
Wednesday, May 1
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
Albert Lewin, 1951, with Ava Gardner and James Mason; cinematography by Jack Cardiff
In this retelling of the legend of the ghostly Flying Dutchman, a ship is doomed to sail the sea forever unless a woman should prove herself willing to die for its captain. Color wizard Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus) brings the spirit of Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray and other surrealists to the screen, while his camera makes love to Ava Gardner at peak goddess form. A neo-classical fantasia that shares space with Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Pandora is a rarely-screened gem.
Tuesday, May 7
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Tales of Hoffmann
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951, with Moira Shearer; cinematography by Jack Cardiff
E.T.A. Hoffmann is most famous for The Nutcracker, but the sugar plum-coated Christmas ballet you know is a long way from his original, eerie novella. The fact is, Hoffmann was surreal long before the art form had a name, and Tales of Hoffmann delivers his favorite themes: uncanny automatons, weird magic and dark miracles. See why George Romero declared this masterpiece from Powell and Pressburger “my favorite film of all time; the movie that made me want to make movies.” An opera, a ballet and a work of pure cinema, Tales of Hoffmann overwhelms as one of the greatest gesamtkunstwerks—"total works of art"—ever brought to the screen.
Wednesday, May 8
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Last Year at Marienbad
Alain Resnais, 1961, with Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig
Decades before Before Sunrise, the art of intellectual seduction was practiced in Last Year at Marienbad—one of the most dreamlike, beguiling films ever made, the artiest of all art films. The plot is simple: a man and woman stroll the palatial halls and manicured gardens of a grand old hotel while he tries to convince her that they’ve met before. The filmmaking is the real seduction, and you are the object of its desire. Alfred Hitchcock makes a cardboard cameo appearance in what Mattie Lucas described as “a treatise on memory and longing, of ideas lost to the fog of time, shards of dreams scattered across a marble floor.” French, with English subtitles.
Tuesday, May 14
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)
Jean Cocteau, 1946, with Jean Marais and Josette Day
Disney was right, it’s a tale as old as time: “Beauty and the Beast” goes back some 4,000 years. Nowhere on film has the story been told with such surreal, dreamlike, yet soulful lucidity than in Jean Cocteau’s version. Made on a shoestring budget that necessitated ingenious practical special effects—and there are many—the film is pure magic. Abandon yourself to the enchantment. French, with English subtitles.
Wednesday, May 15
4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
Belle de Jour
Luis Buñuel, 1967, with Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and Jean Sorel
A founding father of cinematic surrealism, Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou) was still shocking and aweing audiences in the 1960s and 70s. In this surreal—and sexually provocative—riff on the Beauty and the Beast tale that is also a mirror-image of Marnie, a married woman seeks escape from her humdrum marriage by joining a brothel. What follows is a confounding trip into the imaginal, a zone where reality and illusion warp, twist and change places. Buñuel leads us into the labyrinth, but it’s up to us to find our way out. Writes critic Richard Schrader: “Belle de Jour ranks… as a landmark not only of Luis Buñuel's career, but of the history of motion pictures. The only other filmmaker with an approach to reality similar to Buñuel's is Robbe-Grillet, [writer of Last Year at] Marienbad.” French, with English subtitles.