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SWEPT AWAY 50th anniversary screening February 13 at the Royal. Regular engagement starts February 21 in Glendale.

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For those who don’t like Valentine’s Day, join us for an “anti-romantic” evening with Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away. Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of the odd-couple arthouse sensation Swept Away. Lina Wertmüller’s provocative, fable-like two-hander brings together Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini for an oft-ugly battle of the sexes (and classes) cage match with the sparkling Mediterranean for a beautiful backdrop.

 

Not long after setting off on a yachting expedition, Milanese millionairess Raffaella (Melato) finds herself stranded on an obscure island with the boat’s deckhand (Giannini), a working-class Sicilian communist who promptly establishes dominion over the isle — and his once-prideful ex-employer. A contentious cinematic war of words, which has lost none of its power to inspire heated debate among its viewers.

We will also have a daily regular engagement February 21-27 at the Laemmle Glendale.

In 1976, Wertmüller became the first woman ever to earn an Oscar nomination as Best Director for her film Seven Beauties.

“[With Swept Away,] Wertmüller delivered the first girl power picture, and it’s a stunning masterstroke of a movie.”  – Bill Gibron, DVD Talk

“Wertmüller didn’t just tap the tangled sexual politics of the ’70s— she lit a fuse under them.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“As ferocious as it is funny.” – Judith Crist

“A powder keg of class and sexual politics.” – Scott Tobias, AV Club

 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964) 60th Anniversary Screenings.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classic Series present this month’s screening in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Michelangelo Antonioni’s vibrant masterpiece RED DESERT, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1964 and collected rave reviews around the world on its release over the next several months. We will show the film at five of our theaters at 7 PM on Wednesday, July 31.

Antonioni had earned critical acclaim for the three movies in his “alienation trilogy”—’L’Avventura,’ ‘La Notte,’ and ‘Eclipse’ — made during the early 1960s. RED DESERT explored some of the same themes but introduced a new element to the director’s work. The three earlier movies were all shot in black-and-white, but with RED DESERT Antonioni decided to experiment with color cinematography for the first time, and critics heralded his achievement. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann declared, “With Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, the art of the film advances…quite simply, it is the best use of color I have ever seen in a film, exquisite in itself.” Kauffmann added, “there is a buried history of modern painting in it, from the Impressionists through Mondrian to Hopper and Wyeth.”

Monica Vitti, who had starred in all three of Antonioni’s earlier movies, has the leading role of Giuliana, the wife of an industrialist in Ravenna. She is emotionally troubled and eventually begins an affair with an employee at her husband’s factory. Carlo Chionetti plays the husband, and Richard Harris — fresh from his Oscar-nominated performance in Lindsay Anderson’s ‘This Sporting Life’ — plays her lover. Antonioni wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Tonino Guerra.

In addition to its psychological themes, the film offers prescient critique of industrial pollution, with the color cinematography contributing to this political commentary. A key collaborator was director of photography Carlo Di Palma, who worked closely with Antonioni to paint the landscapes when necessary to create the desired mood of malaise. Antonioni and Di Palma collaborated again on the director’s most successful movie, the English-language ‘Blowup,’ an Oscar nominee in 1966. Other directors around the world — including Ettore Scola, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Sidney Lumet — worked with Di Palma. The cinematographer later established a fruitful collaboration with Woody Allen on such films as ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ ‘Radio Days,’ and ‘Bullets Over Broadway.’

Time magazine called RED DESERT “at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by Italy’s masterful Michelangelo Antonioni.” More recently, Geoff Andrew of Time Out hailed “perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni’s entire career.” Robbie Collin of London’s Daily Telegraph declared, “Almost half a century on, RED DESERT remains a film of rare beauty and brooding erotic intensity.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called the film Antonioni’s “most mysterious and awe-inspiring work.”

Screening one night only at the Royal in West Los Angeles, the Town Center in Encino, and Laemmle Theatres in Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall.

THE LOVERS (LES AMANTS) 65th Anniversary Screenings June 19.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present 65th anniversary screenings of Louis Malle’s ‘The Lovers‘ (‘Les Amants’) starring Jeanne Moreau, on June 19 for one night only at 7:00 PM in West Los Angeles, Encino, Glendale, Claremont, and Santa Clarita. When first released in the United States in 1959, the film became an art house sensation with frank sexuality and nudity that inflamed the prudish American censors. Those censors, the Catholic Legion of Decency, and the repressive Hollywood Production Code wielded considerable influence at that time, preventing American films from exploring adult themes in a provocative manner.

 

The film tells the story of a bored and neglected French upper-middle-class wife and mother (Moreau) who falls for a young archaeologist (Jean-Marc Bory), commencing an affair just hours after their initial meeting. Their extended seminude lovemaking scene was the incendiary element that sparked conservative outrage and crackdowns on theaters showing the film. In one notorious case that was later resolved by the Supreme Court, a suburban Cleveland theater manager was arrested on obscenity charges. When other Ohio communities also banned the film, Variety reported, “It looked like Ohio, for a time, might declare war on France.”

Louis Malle made his feature directorial debut with the crime thriller ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ in 1958, also starring Moreau, so the sensual drama ‘The Lovers‘ as his second film “marked the stylistically conscious Malle apart from his tear-away Nouvelle Vague colleagues” according to Time Out. In ‘The Lovers,’ adapted by novelist Louise de Vilmorin from a 19th century short story, Malle presents a study of “bourgeois emptiness and sexual yearnings,” illuminated by the deft black-and-white cinematography of Henri Decae. Malle would go onto an esteemed career that included such notable films as ‘Murmur of the Heart,’ ‘Lacombe Lucien,’ ‘Atlantic City,’ and ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ over the next three decades.

Although she had been acting in films for a decade, ‘The Lovers‘ established Moreau’s screen persona as a “commanding, willful, and sultry presence,” propelling her to international stardom. Her career highlights in the 1960s include memorable performances in ‘Jules and Jim,’ ‘La Notte,’ ‘Diary of a Chambermaid’ and ‘The Bride Wore Black.’ As a legacy, the commercial success of ‘The Lovers’ helped popularize foreign language films in the United States in that era, now regarded as the golden age of the art house.

“It is incredible to think that Malle was only 25 years old when he made ‘The Lovers,’ as it seems to hold the wisdom and erotic impulses of a much older man.” ~ Justine Smith, Vague Visages

Anniversary screenings of Claire Denis’s debut, “a film of infinite delicacy,” CHOCOLAT.

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The next film in our Anniversary Classics Abroad series is Claire Denis’s intense 1988 debut feature, Chocolat, screening April 24 at our Claremont, Encino, Glendale, Newhall and West L.A. theaters. Denis drew on her own childhood experiences growing up in colonial French Africa for her visually beautiful, multilayered, languorously absorbing movie. She explores many of the themes that would recur throughout her work. Returning to the town where she grew up in Cameroon after many years living in France, a white woman (Mireille Perrier) reflects on her relationship with Protée (Isaach De Bankolé), a Black servant with whom she formed a friendship while not fully grasping the racial divides that governed their worlds.

Roger Ebert was quick to identify Chocolat as a major accomplishment. His review is worth reading in full, but here’s its final paragraph:

“Chocolat is one of those rare films with an entirely mature, adult sensibility; it is made with the complexity and subtlety of a great short story, and it assumes an audience that can understand what a strong flow of sex can exist between two people who barely even touch each other. It is a deliberately beautiful film – many of the frames create breathtaking compositions – but it is not a travelogue and it is not a love story. It is about how racism can prevent two people from looking each other straight in the eyes, and how they punish each other for the pain that causes them. This is one of the best films of the year.”
Denis was nominated for several major prizes for Chocolat: the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the Best First Feature at the César Awards, and the Best Foreign Language Film prize by the New York Film Critics Circle. Some of her later career highlights include Beau Travail, High Life, White Material and 35 Shots of Rum.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES 60th anniversary screenings March 19.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present this month’s installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad Series: Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Oscar-nominated erotic drama, Woman in the Dunes . Actually, the film was nominated in two separate years. In 1964, when it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it was one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1965, when the film was released in America, Teshigahara earned a nomination for Best Director. This was a milestone because he was the first Asian director ever to win that recognition from the Academy. The great Akira Kurosawa earned his only Best Director nomination a decade later, for his film Ran. Other Asian directors who have earned Oscar nominations and victories in recent years (including Ang Lee and Bong Joon Ho) owe something to Teshigahara for paving the way.

Woman in the Dunes is adapted from a novel by esteemed Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, who also contributed to the screenplay. Eiji Okada (the star of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour and of Hollywood movies The Ugly American and The Yakuza) portrays an entomologist searching for a rare species of beetle in the sand dunes of a remote part of Japan. When he misses the bus to return home, he spends the night with a widow living in the dunes, portrayed by Kyoko Kishida. Eventually their relationship evolves into a more meaningful connection that transforms the life of the scientist.

The film was highly praised for the atmospheric cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, which immerses the viewer in the spectacular setting. The film also captivated American audiences because of its frank sexuality, which was a prime attraction of international films during the 1950s and 60s, when Hollywood was still straitjacketed by the censorious Production Code. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington declared, “In stunningly composed images by Teshigahara and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, that eroticism becomes overwhelming.”

Other critics took note of the film’s eroticism as well as its cinematic achievements and sharp characterizations. As Roger Ebert wrote, “Woman in the Dunes retains its power because it is a perfect union of subject, style and idea.” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther concurred that the film contains “a bewitching poetry and power.” Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film “a timeless contemplation of life’s essential mystery and a triumph of bold, innovative style.”

We’ll screen Woman in the Dunes at 7 pm on March 19 at our Claremont, Glendale, Santa Clarita, West L.A. and Encino theaters.

“More than almost any other film I can think of, Woman in the Dunes‘ uses visuals to create a tangible texture — of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature.” ~ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“The camera work by Hiroshi Segawa is often extraordinary in its ability to make a sheet of sand something mysterious and wonderful.” ~ William J. Nazzaro, Arizona Republic

“The camera’s power to turn fact into metaphor catches the intent of Kobo Abe’s book perfectly.” ~ Michael Kustow, Sight & Sound

“The couple’s grimly inescapable dilemma becomes hugely complex and terrifyingly resonant — a sexualised version of the Sisyphus myth, recounted with a distinct touch of Buñuelian absurdism.” ~ Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday

“Teshigahara’s direction and Segawa’s camera-work often render the mundane startling and new, a claim that only good films can make.” ~ Mark Chalon Smith, Los Angeles Times

“Woman in the Dunes remains a masterpiece, a timeless contemplation of life’s essential mystery and a triumph of bold, innovative style.” ~ Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
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“Teshigahara’s creative background was in Japan’s avant-garde arts scene, and there’s a powerful expressiveness to the film’s black-and-white cinematography.” ~ Tom Dawson, BBC.com

FANNY AND ALEXANDER 40th Anniversary Holiday Season Screenings of Bergman’s Final Masterpiece December 13.

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The Anniversary Classics Series and Laemmle Theatres present 40th anniversary screenings of Ingmar Bergman’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1983) on Wednesday, December 13 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: the Royal, Newhall, Glendale, and Claremont. The Academy Award-winning film is the last entry of the year of the popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series, and a timely program for the holiday season.

Bergman, one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, was a towering figure in international cinema who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century “golden age of the arthouse” era, with such meditative classics exploring the psyche and soul as ‘The Seventh Seal,’ ‘The Virgin Spring,’ ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ (the latter two winning consecutive Foreign Film Oscars in 1960-61), ‘Persona,’ and expanding into the 1970s with ‘Cries and Whispers,’ a best picture Oscar nominee in 1973, and ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ among others. In the 1980s the Swedish auteur originally planned his memory piece FANNY AND ALEXANDER as his cinematic swan song, with a six-part version for television along with a shortened theatrical release, which premiered internationally first. The theatrical version went onto global acclaim and is widely considered one of Bergman’s finest films.

Set in the first decade of the twentieth century, the film opens with the Ekdahl family’s Christmas celebration, with extended family members and servants gathering for a merry holiday in the town of Uppsala (Bergman’s birthplace). The film unfolds principally through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) who are soon separated from this warm family after the death of their actor-manager father, and the subsequent marriage of their mother (Ewa Froeling) to a strict, cold bishop (Jan Malmsjo). Familiar themes of religious zealotry, which Bergman explored throughout his career, are reexamined with a ghostly supernatural touch in Bergman’s haunted memories of his own clergyman father.

Plaudits for the film ranged from Variety’s “a sumptuously produced period piece (with) elegance and simplicity,” to Vincent Canby in The New York Times, “a big, dark, beautiful, generous family chronicle,” as a prelude to both the New York Film Critics and L.A. Film Critics naming it the best foreign film of the year. Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Examiner described it as “an epic family film that revisits Bergman’s favorite subjects—marriage, passion, infidelity, death, God—and yet in ways more generous and less austere than in his other films.” Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian praised “the glorious acting ensemble, an amazing collection of pure performing intelligence,” and summarized the film as “a brilliant—in fact maybe unique—fusion of Shakespeare and Dickens.”

The film went on to garner a record six Academy Award nominations, with directing and writing nods for Bergman, along with four wins: Foreign Language Film (Bergman’s third), Cinematography (Sven Nykvist, his consummate collaborator over two decades and his second win, both with Bergman), Art Direction (Anna Asp), and Costume Design (Marik Vos-Lundh). The four Oscars were the most for an international film in the twentieth century, and a fitting tribute to the legacy of a master filmmaker. Experience FANNY AND ALEXANDER back on the big screen this holiday season for one showing only on December 13.

“One of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanese cinema,” UGETSU 70th Anniversary Screenings.

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By the time he made Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other directors of a younger generation. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose pursuit of fame and fortune leads them far astray from their loyal wives. Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.

We will screen Ugetsu on October 11 at our Glendale, Claremont, Royal and Newhall theaters.

Pauline Kael wrote, “This subtle, violent yet magical film is one of the most amazing of the Japanese movies that played American art houses after the international success of Rashomon in 1951.” Japanese film scholar Donald Richie called Ugetsu “one of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanese cinema.” Many later directors, including Martin Scorsese and Andrei Tarkovsky, cited it as a personal favorite.

“With rare humanity, Mizoguchi reveals the toll these misadventures take on the souls of both men and their wives, many moments an uncanny synthesis of the realistic and the otherworldly.” ~ Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

“Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi’s most widely heralded film, is a mysterious, incantatory, and gorgeous parable.” ~ Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

“A ravishingly composed, evocatively beautiful film.” ~ Rod McShane, Time Out

Oscar-winner NOWHERE IN AFRICA 20th anniversary screenings September 20.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 20th anniversary screenings of the Academy-Award winning film NOWHERE IN AFRICA as the next entry in the Anniversary Abroad Series of notable international films. (Following our September 13 screening of SOYLENT GREEN at the Royal with special guest Leigh Taylor-Young.) Coinciding with the High Holidays, NOWHERE IN AFRICA is about a German Jewish refugee family relocating to Kenya to escape the Nazis just before the outbreak of WWII, will play for one night only, September 20 at four Laemmle locations (Royal, Glendale, Claremont, and Newhall).

 

The Foreign Language Film (AKA International) Oscar winner in 2003, based on the autobiographical novel by Stefanie Zweig, was adapted for the screen by writer-director Caroline Link, who had been previously nominated in the same category for her 1996 film Beyond Silence. The story concerns the Redlich family, Walter (Mirab Ninidze), his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler), and their daughter Regina (Lea Kurka as younger, Karoline Eckertz as older) who flee Nazi persecution in Germany in 1938. Walter leaves behind his law profession and becomes the manager of a British-owned farm in Kenya. While his nine-year-old daughter Regina takes to her new African life, his snobbish wife Jettel has difficulty with the family’s reduced status. They are attended by their Kenyan cook Owuor (beautifully played by Sidede Onyulo), who offers an African perspective to the tale. With the outbreak of WWII, the family is interned by the British along with all German citizens, an ironic twist since they had fled Germany to avoid such a fate in their homeland. The war and their plight put even more pressure on the strained relationship of Walter and Jettel, with Regina (now a teenager) caught in the middle.

Admiration from critics of the day included assessments from Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who said the film was, “laced with poignancy, conflict, urgency, and compassion.” Roger Ebert praised Link for her “interest in good stories and vivid, well-defined characters.” Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune cited it as “a lovely film with a deeply humane perspective.” Rita Kempley in the Washington Post called it a “consistently absorbing family saga that is primarily a safari of the soul.” Newsweek’s David Ansen noted, “an absorbing tale of cultural displacement. It’s also a remarkable, complex examination of a marriage…with its lush cinematography and lush score, (it) has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.” Some critics even called it perfect Oscar bait at the time, and the Academy members agreed, rewarding it with the Foreign Language Film Oscar.