LIVES WELL LIVED filmmaker Sky Bergman will participate in Q&A’s at the Monica Film Center after the 7:30 PM show on Friday, April 20 screening and at the Playhouse 7 after the 5:20 PM show on Saturday, April 21.
ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents THE STROM PROJECT: FRAGMENT in Pasadena
ART IN THE ARTHOUSE invites you to view our newest exhibit in Pasadena from photographer, musician, and cultural anthropologist Yale Strom. All works in THE STROM PROJECT: FRAGMENT exhibit are for sale and on display until June 14, 2018.
About the exhibit
Forty years ago, musician and cultural anthropologist YALE STROM trekked to Eastern Europe. He came across Jews living in cities, towns and tiny villages, often reminiscent of a pre-war shtetl environment. He bore witness to a dwindled Jewish population with some areas completely devoid of Jewish life. But he also found that a few larger cities were quite populous, and had actually exhibited an increase in numbers.
On his journey, Strom discovered a rich tapestry, including remnants of Hasidic and Orthodox worlds, Jews who were greatly devoted to communism, and parents who were fervently seeking better lives for their children and their children’s children.This photographic exhibition is a small window into a large field of conditions as they were, as they are, and perhaps as they will remain. Strom seeks out the moment with an artist’s hyperawareness, capturing it with an emotion and tone that is singular and authentic. The artist expresses a quality of relaxed spontaneity in his work, an organic, natural approach that never feels preset. The shots were taken with a 35mm Nikon FE camera using Kodak Tri-X 400 B&W film.
Strom’s career has been incredibly multi-disciplinary. In the klezmer world, he is celebrated as a leading scholar, ethnographer, virtuoso violinist and bandleader. Remarkably, he is a writer of 12 books, a musician/composer of 15 recordings and a documentarian of 9 films.
His newest film, American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Victor Debs, starts Friday, May 4th in Pasadena and Santa Monica. The film traces the history of American populism with the man who inspired progressive ideas– from FDR’s New Deal to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
– Joshua Elias, CURATOR
I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! 50th Anniversary Screening with Actress Leigh Taylor-Young In Person
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of the hit Peter Sellers comedy from 1968, I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! The Establishment meets the counterculture in this topical and often uproarious satire that poked fun at many of the conflicts dividing the country during the tumultuous 1960s.
Sellers plays an uptight Los Angeles lawyer whose life unravels when he meets a young hippie, played by Leigh Taylor-Young in her feature film debut.
Hy Averback directed the first screenplay written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and the picture’s success allowed Mazursky to make his directorial debut one year later on another swinging sixties comedy, ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.’
The supporting cast includes Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet as Sellers’ intrusive mother, Joyce Van Patten as his befuddled fiancée, along with Herb Edelman, Grady Sutton, Salem Ludwig, and David Arkin.
One of the film’s memorable set pieces revolves around a supply of marijuana brownies that come from a recipe in cultural icon Alice B. Toklas’s famous cookbook. With marijuana now legal in California and in several other states, the film takes on renewed timeliness and may well give happy viewers a contact high. Of course, if viewers wanted to replicate the experience they could also find some of the best edibles in Canada and indulge. This would certainly give them the same feeling as the main characters.
Back in 1968, Variety declared, “Film blasts off into orbit via top-notch acting and direction.” Pauline Kael, who had recently begun her regular stint reviewing for The New Yorker, called the picture “A giddy, slapdash, entertainingly inconsequential comedy…the picture makes you laugh surprisingly often.” And Leonard Maltin praised this “excellent comedy about the freaking out of mild-mannered L.A. lawyer. Sellers has never been better.” Indeed the film represents one of the highlights of Sellers’ vibrant and diverse list of achievements during the 60s.
Actress Leigh Taylor-Young first came to prominence on the popular ‘Peyton Place’ TV series of the 1960s. Her other films include ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,’ which marked one of the first screen roles for Robert De Niro; John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Horsemen,’ co-starring Omar Sharif; the prophetic sci-fi movie, ‘Soylent Green;’ and the suspense thriller ‘Jagged Edge.’ She has worked in the theater and costarred in several popular TV series, including ‘Picket Fences,’ for which she won an Emmy, ‘Dallas,’ and ‘Passions.’ In recent years she has also been active in humanitarian and spiritual activities for the United Nations and other organizations.
I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! followed by Q&A with Actress Leigh Taylor-Young screens Wednesday, April 25, at 7:30 PM at the Royal Theatre in West L.A. Click here for tickets.
Format: DVD
KRYSTAL Actor-Director William H. Macy in Person this Weekend at the Music Hall.
KRYSTAL actor-director William H. Macy will participate in a Q&A after the 7:30 PM screening at the Music Hall on Saturday, April 14.
SHELTER Q&A at the Fine Arts on Sunday, April 8.
National Public Radio film critic Ella Taylor will lead a Q&A after the 1:30 PM screening of SHELTER at the Ahrya Fine Arts on Sunday, April 8.
ROGERS PARK Q&A at the Playhouse Opening Weekend.
ROGERS PARK actors Christine Horn (‘American Crime Story’) and Jonny Mars (‘A Ghost Story’) and director Kyle Henry will participate in Q&A’s at the Playhouse after 7:40 PM screenings Friday-Sunday, April 6-8.
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS 50th Anniversary Screening on Wednesday, April 18 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program, a 50th anniversary screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s memorable and still timely political drama, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.
The film was an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film of 1966, but it was not released in the United States until 1968, when it received additional nominations for best director and for best original screenplay by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas. The film was considered so inflammatory that it was not shown in France until 1971.
The picture, filmed in black-and-white to approximate the look of a newsreel, dramatizes Algeria’s war of independence against France. It focuses on the years from 1954 to 1957, when the National Liberation Front began to organize in the Casbah of Algiers to carry out terrorist attacks on civilians as well as the French army. This led to a fierce and brutal counter-insurgency by the French, which meant the battles dragged on for years.
To insure authenticity, Pontecorvo cast the film mainly with non-professional actors recruited in Algeria. The film’s one professional actor, Jean Martin, gave a vivid performance as the complex, intelligent French officer who understands the grievances of the Algerians even as he fights ruthlessly to defeat them. The film’s urgency was heightened by the score of Ennio Morricone.
The film’s influence extended well beyond the cinema. It became a sort of handbook of revolutionary techniques that was studied by many radical groups over the years. Yet in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon also screened the movie in order to better understand the civil war unleashed in that country.
Many prominent filmmakers–including Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone–all testified to influence of Pontecorvo’s movie on their own work. Critic David Elliott of the San Diego Union Tribune called The Battle of Algiers “perhaps the finest political film of the 1960s.” The LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor agreed that it was “a classic of politically engaged filmmaking.”
Our 50th anniversary screening of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1968) screens Wednesday, April 18 at 7pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.
Format: DCP
Friday the 13th Screening of ROSEMARY’S BABY at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills
To provide shivers and thrills on Friday the 13th, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of one of the most terrifying movies of all time, ROSEMARY’S BABY.
Ira Levin’s ingenious best-selling novel imagined a witches’ coven hiding in plain sight in contemporary Manhattan and hatching a plot to bring the Devil’s son to earth. Producer William Castle, the mastermind behind many successful B-horror movies, graduated to the A ranks with this classy production. Paramount’s head of production, Robert Evans, hired acclaimed European director Roman Polanski to make his Hollywood debut with the film.
The casting of the film was inspired. As the innocent woman at the center of the diabolical conspiracy, the filmmakers chose a relatively new face to movies, Mia Farrow, and she played the role with endearing vulnerability. The film’s success catapulted her to full-fledged stardom.
John Cassavetes took a break from his own independent productions to play Farrow’s conniving husband. The brilliance of the casting extended to the supporting players, a veritable Who’s Who of vintage Hollywood and Broadway actors, including Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, and Elisha Cook Jr. Gordon won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her spot-on portrayal of a nosy neighbor with a sinister agenda. Polanski earned an Oscar nomination for his adapted screenplay.
Behind-the-scenes credits were just as impressive. Six-time Oscar nominee William Fraker (Bullitt, Heaven Can Wait) was the cinematographer, while two-time Oscar winner Richard Sylbert (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Chinatown, Dick Tracy) was the production designer. The eerie score was composed by a gifted friend of Polanski, Christopher Komeda, who died tragically at the age of 37, soon after the release of the film.
Among the stellar reviews for the film, Leonard Maltin hailed a “Classic modern-day thriller by Ira Levin, perfectly realized by writer-director Polanski.” Stephen Witty of the Newark Star-Ledger called it “one of the finest horror films ever made.” In 2014 Rosemary’s Baby was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
ROSEMARY’S BABY screens Friday, April 13 at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.
Format: DCP
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