New Cinematheque Program is Out

Yay! I look so much forward to seeing the new Cinematheque program, so I can find out what's coming up. After I greedily snatch it up, most often from in front of the Granville Book Company, I spend the next hour or so reading it... It's not a particulary exciting spring season, after the Bergman festival, but there are movies I want to see almost every week: Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One: The Reconstruction; Gordon Pinsent's The Rowdyman (a piece of Canadiana I've not seen; I quite liked his other film, John and the Missus, tho'); an Orson Welles double bill of F for Fake and Confidential Report (aka Mr. Arkadin); and some heavy-hitting contemporary Russian cinema from Kira Muratova and Andrey Zvyagintsev. Plus there's Drawing Out the Demons -- a film bio of Attila Richard Lukacs, whose work has fascinated me since, in high school, on an obligatory field trip, I was floored at the VAG by a giant canvas featuring Henry Rollins, head shaved, sitting amidst cherubs, grapes, and the entrails of a disembowelled minotaur... There'll also be a Jewish film festival (I ain't looked to see what's coming to that, yet) and a film bio of Edvard Munch (I generally hate lives-of-the-artist movies, but I'll see this no less). Not a great spring, but a nice, solid one. Oh, yeah, Jacques Tati's Playtime will be coming up, too! I've always meant to get around to Tati...

Tomorrow is the last night of the Bergman festival; they'll be playing Bergman's ugliest, bleakest, most depressing film, From the Life of the Marionettes, a film Bergman made in Germany when fleeing tax problems in Sweden. It begins with a man murdering and anally raping a prostitute (if one can be said to rape a corpse), then reconstructs the days leading up to the crime. I've only ever seen it in a dubbed version on video, which I hunted down in my 20's, when I was trying to see every Bergman film available; I'm really looking forward to seeing it on the screen in its proper language. I'm a bit nervous about its content, tho', I gotta confess -- worry that maybe I'll find it an exercise in scab-picking. (Ooh, let's see what's under here...). It's a pretty damned dark film (I guess having to flee your homeland can do that to a guy).