It’s a busy week at the Museum of Modern Art, with two major series. Modern Matinees: Sir Sidney Poitier continues this weekend with Pressure Point (1962) on Friday, Blackboard Jungle (1955) on Wednesday and The Defiant Ones (1958) on next Thursday. Pressure Point is probably the least well known of these three. Poitier plays the head of a psychiatric hospital who reminisces about a compelling case. Bobby Darin is surprisingly capable as the Nazi sympathizer Poitier must treat.
The series runs through February 28. For complete info and show times, CLICK HERE.
And To Save and Project: The 16th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation begins with a loaded and diverse collection of features. It’s “a festival dedicated to celebrating newly preserved and restored films from archives, studios, distributors, foundations, and independent filmmakers around the world.”
This week’s programs include collections of early British animation; newly restored British and American short films from the early 20th Century including early British experiments with color in the silent film; also Forbidden Paradise (1924), The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Finishing School (1934).
To Save and Project runs through January 31. For complete info and show times, CLICK HERE.
MoMA is located at 11 West 53 St. For info on all their programs CLICK HERE.
Calling all knuckleheads. Film Forum Jr. presents More Three Stooges Mania Saturday and Sunday at 11:00am. The program includes four classic shorts: Men in Black (1934), Three Little Pigskins (1934) (look for a young Lucille Ball), Punch Drunks (1934) and Pop Goes the Easel (1935).Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston St. For complete info and show times, CLICK HERE.
Anthology Film Archives will kick off an extraordinary and ambitious series tomorrow: City Symphonies. The series will feature some of the seminal films of this genre, as well as a diverse selection of films documenting the city life, city landscape, city rhythms.
“The development of the City Symphony was closely intertwined with the dizzying pace of technological advancement and change that marked the advent of the 20th century, and the increased speed, cacophony, and sense of fragmentation that this new era brought with it.”
My pick for this week is Berlin: Symphony Of A City (1927), by Karl Freund, Carl Mayer & Walter Ruttmann, which screens on January 15. It’s at once a chronicle of a day in the life of a great city and an abstract study of the forms, patterns of the elements of daily life. It’s a city ballet as well as a symphony. For complete schedules and info, CLICK HERE.
Over in New Jersey, the West Orange Classic Film Festival continues, with Fritz Lang’s late expressionist masterpiece M (1931), introduced by my friend and collaborator Gerard Amsellem. Peter Lorre is a child murderer pursued by the police, the public and, eventually the underworld. The cliche, largely accurate, is that when moving pictures started talking, they stopped moving. Lang’s use of asynchronous sound (at a time when Hollywood was just emerging from the staid and static mic-hidden-in-the flower-pot period) is extraordinarily sophisticated for his first sound film,. And it allows Karl Freund’s camera is to move unencumbered. (If you want to get wonky about it, check out the 1928 “Statement” signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov regarding asynchronous sound). Screenings are at the AMC DINE-IN Essex Green 9 in West Orange. For Info and complete festival schedule, CLICK HERE.
ETC.
Downtown at The Metrograph, it’s The African Queen (1951) on Saturday and Abbott And Costello Meet The Mummy Saturday and Sunday.
Mikey And Nicky (1976) at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema on Saturday and Sunday.
On Saturday at Suffern, N. Y.’s Lafayette Theater, it’s Blazing saddles (1974).
ALSO
Shout out to my friend Myron for turning me on to Kanopy. It’s a streaming source available for free through local public libraries. For more info, go to kanopy.com.
