Battle of Algiers

The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is famous, but for some time it’s been available only in washed-out prints with poorly translated, white-on-white subtitles. The newly translated and subtitled 35-millimeter print is presumably the version that was privately screened in August 2004 for military personnel by the Pentagon as a field guide to fighting terrorism. Ironically, Pontecorvo’s epic was once used by the Black Panthers as a training film. In fact, not much in the current Iraq situation is historically comparable to the late-fifties Algerian struggle for independence dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, but its anatomy of terror remains unsurpassed—and, woefully, ever fresh.

“If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.”
– ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, Former National Security Advisor

Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky • 1972 • USSR

Based on the science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris has become the most popular of Tarkovsky’s works. Cosmonaut Kris Kelvin is dispatched to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. The scientists must face the alien intelligence of the ocean-covered planet, which is able to materialize anyone from the past. Kelvin must face his dead wife, and again confront the division between them which drove her to a suicide.

“A towering movie... one of the most thoughtful science fiction epics ever and one of the few worthy successors to 2001, A Space Odyssey.”
– David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

Broken Blossoms
D.W. Griffiths • 1919 • USA

D. W. Griffith reached a pinnacle of expressiveness in this tender yet tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London.

Richard Barthelmess gives a sensitive portrayal of a Chinese man who travels to England to spread the pacifist teachings of the Orient, but it is Lillian Gish who illuminates the screen. In this, the most heart-rending performance of her career, she plays a fifteen-year-old street urchin who longs to escape her miserable existence. Emotionally scarred she collapses in the shop of the lonely and disillusioned man who tenderly nurses her back to health, when an unspoken romance flowers between them.

In some ways, Broken Blossoms was Griffith’s response to critics of “The Birth Of A Nation”, an effort to clear himself of lingering charges of racism. However, cinematic convention forbade physical intimacy between the two races. With this in mind, Griffith took what might have been a bold interracial romance and turned it into something more ethereal: a form of cinematic poetry that engages the viewer through subtle gestures and changes of expression, meticulously choreographed and gracefully assembled.

Les Bonnes Femmes
Claude Chabrol • 1960 • France

As ominous organ music resounds, the Scope camera tracks through the seemingly endless halls of a baroque grand hotel — alternately thronged with tuxedoes and gowns or echoingly deserted — as Giorgio Albertazzi tries to persuade an initially disbelieving Delphine Seyrig (in gowns by Chanel — Coco herself!) that they’d met the year before, even as the sepulchral Sacha Pitoëff (her husband?) hovers about, continually beating all comers in a kind of pick-up-sticks game.

“To this day I don’t understand Last Year at Marienbad, but I think it’s beautiful, and I’m intrigued by it.”
– Francis Ford Coppola, January 2008

Modern Times
Charlie Chaplin • 1936 • USA

Playing a tramp struggling to survive in a modern industrial society, Charlie Chaplin created with MODERN TIMES, one of the most elaborate cinematic critiques of the effects of mass production on 20th century life. With his usual charm and bad luck, Charlie Chaplin’s most famous character The Tramp, executes some of his most famous slapstick routines around massive/glorified machines, accidentally ends up in the middle of a communist rally, and falls in love with a street waif played by Chaplin’s then real-life partner Paulette Goddard.

In 2001, the Chaplin heirs concluded a search for a worldwide partner by signing with international film producer, sales agent and distributor MK2. To celebrate their new partnership, the Chaplin family and MK2 launched a high-definition digital restoration of “Modern Times”, a first for a Chaplin film.

Yeelen
Souleymane Cissé • 1987 • Africa (Mali)

This adaptation of an ancient oral legend from Mali, is one the most acclaimed and widely seen African films ever made. An Oedipal story mixed with magic, Yeelen is as visually stunning as anything from Hollywood.

Set in the powerful Mali Empire of the 13th century, Yeelen follows the journey of Nianankoro, a young warrior who must battle the powerful Komo cult. Nianankoro’s greatest enemy is his own father, a dangerous and corrupt wizard who uses his dark magic to try and destroy his son. Traveling over the arid Bambara, Fulani and Dogan lands of ancient West Africa, Nianankoro eventually comes face to face with his father in a final fatal showdown. Cissé’s extraordinary use of landscapes and light produces a unique and striking cinematic style.

“Ravishingly beautiful...One of the great experiences of world cinema”
-- Shelia Benson, The Los Angeles Times

“Conceivably the greatest African film ever made...should make George Lucas green with envy... not to be missed”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader.

Three Penny Opera
G.W. Pabst • 1931 • Germany

Classic adaptation of Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill musical set in the 19th century London underworld. Mackie, the head of criminals falls in love with Polly, the daughter of Peachum, king of the beggars. Both Peachum and Mackie’s mistress, Jenny, attempt to break up the happy couple and send Mackie to the gallows. A brilliant satire of crime & capitalism in which it is impossible to tell them apart. Pabst’s stylized use of sets & lighting make this one of the only expressionist musicals.

Belle de Jour
Claude Chabrol • 1960 • France

Buñuel wondrously conveys how the patriarchal rule of the film’s real world spills into the fantasy world Séverine creates for herself: Rather than take ownership of her pleasure, she blames Husson for planting the seed of prostitution into her head, and when she falls for the dreamy, metal-teethed Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), she finds that her encounters with him inside the brothel are not unlike those between a wife and her abusive, controlling husband. The film’s final rhetorical shift is foreshadowed when Pierre is inexplicably transfixed by an empty wheelchair outside an apartment complex. When Buñuel reveals that the whole of Belle de Jour may have been a dream, he permits Séverine to have the last laugh via a radical wish fulfillment. In the end, she defies her patriarchal oppression by moving fantasy into reality just as things get too prickly in dreams. Buñuel understood that dreams, the language of the subconscious, often tell us more about ourselves than our reality. Belle du Jour comes to understand this language too and, because of it, perseveres.

Last Year at Marienbad
Allain Resnais • 1961 • Italy

Unseen by American audiences for thirty years, Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes is a triumphant rediscovery: a deft blend of frank eroticism, moments of Hitchcockian suspense and cinematic derring-do that characterizes the best films of the French New Wave.

In the drab and dingy Paris of the early sixties, four shop-keeping girls are looking for love -- of one kind or another. While their lecherous and petty boss savors every opportunity to deliver a dressing-down, the girls find emotional escape by flirting with delivery men, wandering the nightclubs and gossiping about the enigmatic motorcyclist who hangs about, following Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano), the doe-eyed romantic. For the vulnerable, timid Jacqueline, his dogged persistence can only signify the true love in which she so fervently believes. But when she finally decides to speak to the mysterious stranger, her dreams of romantic bliss are marred only by nagging suspicions... Largely forgotten in the United States since its release, Les Bonnes Femmes is a tense yet airy drama which reminds us that love and danger often walk hand in hand.

“One of the great films of the sixties.” - Andrew Sarris
“A masterpiece...deeply unsettling.” - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice