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“Celebrated French writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who wrote together under the nom de plume Boileau-Narcejac, are best known for such works as the novel D’ENTRE LES MORTS which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958), the adaptation of Jean Redon’s novel LES YEUX SANS VISAGE into Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), and the novel CELLE QUI N’ÉTAIT PLUS from which Henri-Georges Clouzot fashioned his cult classic DIABOLIQUE (1955). Chechik’s 1996 version of DIABOLIQUE, which recounts the story of the wife and mistress of a cruel schoolmaster who try to do him in, was a box office and critical disaster, despite the presence of actresses Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani and Chechik’s faithfulness to the original text. A case study in adaptation and remake; at the same time, perhaps due rehabilitation.”—PF (107 mins.)
DIABOLIQUE screens on Tuesday, May 21 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Literature Into Film series.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here.
Buñuel employs the beautiful Catherine Deneuve in a chilling surrealist horror story of individuals destroyed by the moral codes of a corrupt society. Set in Toledo, Spain in the 1920s, an innocent orphan girl is seduced by the aristocratic Don Lope, her Mephistophelean old guardian (Fernando Ray), whom she eventually comes to surpass in cynicism and perversity. Full of Freudian imagery and dark, outrageous humor, TRISTANA is “nothing less than the quintessential Buñuel film of all time … Never before has Deneuve’s beauty seemed more precise and enigmatic.”—Vincent Canby, The New York Times. “[The] scenes have an almost hypnotic power because Buñuel himself finds their images so fascinating … He is having at our subconscious like a surgeon.”—Roger Ebert (95 mins.)
Newly restored to its original glory by the Cohen Film Collection and Filmoteca Española, Madrid.
TRISTANA screens on Saturday, May 18 at 7p.m. and 9p.m. and Sunday May 19 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here.
“Novelist David Ely is frequently cited as a science fiction writer. He should be listed instead as a metaphysical writer, a category that has few followers in America, which perhaps explains why this masterpiece was so little seen. Seeking to make an auteur film, Frankenheimer was attracted by Ely’s unusual Faustian story, which combined horror, suspense, science fiction, mythology, psychology, and more. Assisted by cinematographer James Wong Howe, screenwriter Lewis John Carlino, composer Jerry Goldsmith, and actors John Randolph and Rock Hudson, Frankenheimer creates an evocative atmosphere to tell the story of a disillusioned man who enlists a secret agency to help him fake his death and emerge with a new life.”—PF (106 mins.)
SECONDS screens on Tuesday, May 7 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Literature Into Film series.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here.
Isabelle Huppert plays Maria Vial, a white, coffee plantation owner in an unnamed central African country deep in the throes of political and social upheaval. Through a series of harrowing encounters, Maria is faced with a choice: to flee a populace, many of them young, who seek retribution and the expulsion of her and her family, or to stay and protect all that she knows, however fleeting that may prove. Employing the laconic observational style developed over her twenty-plus-year career, tensions mount until explosive inevitability. “With grave tenderness, Denis reminds us that these murderous, tragically lost boys and girls are still children, a gesture that doesn’t restore their humanity—which she has no right to restore—so much as remind you of the humanity that’s so easily forgotten.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (106 mins.)
WHITE MATERIAL screens on Sunday, May 12 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Claire Denis retrospective, THE LYRICAL SPACE OF CLAIRE DENIS.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here. Series passes are available here for $45 (an $109 value!).
Based on the autobiography of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom Denis has a close working relationship, THE INTRUDER follows Louis Trebor, a middle-aged man in need of a heart transplant. As Trebor traverses the globe, seemingly shopping the black market for a new heart, his son Sidney re-enters his life after years of estrangement. The specter of another son, conceived out of wedlock and possibly living in the Caribbean, threatens to interrupt their bond. While almost certainly Denis’s most oblique and elliptical film, the sensuousness provided by Agnès Godard’s images and the music of Stuart Staples (Tindersticks) make the film a remarkable sensory pleasure. “Exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of picture you don’t bounce back from immediately. Yet its elusiveness is the very source of its poetic energy.”—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon (130 mins.)
THE INTRUDER screens on Sunday, May 12 at 2p.m. and Monday, May 13 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Claire Denis retrospective, THE LYRICAL SPACE OF CLAIRE DENIS.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here. Series passes are available here for $45 (an $109 value!).
Lionel, a metro conductor, lives with his daughter Josephine, a beautiful university student, in a bustling apartment complex outside Paris. They have been sharing the same space for many years and have grown accustomed to one another’s company. Lately, Josephine has started spending time with Noé, a handsome young neighbor, while Lionel finds himself drawn into a romance with Gabrielle, a close friend who also lives in the building. As their lives are pulled in different directions, father and daughter realize they must finally confront an aspect of their past in order to embrace their own destinies. 35 SHOTS OF RUM “is Denis’s warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two’s extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.”—Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice (100 mins.)
35 SHOTS OF RUM screens on Saturday, May 11 at 7p.m. and Sunday, May 12 at 4:45p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Claire Denis retrospective, THE LYRICAL SPACE OF CLAIRE DENIS.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here. Series passes are available here for $45 (an $109 value!).
A city symphony like few others, WINGS OF DESIRE is Wim Wenders’s love letter to Berlin, as told through the eyes of Damiel (Bruno Ganz), an angel in love with circus acrobat Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Damiel, faced with an existential crisis, is forced to choose between a lonely life in heaven spent watching those on Earth or one shot at mortal love. One of the most inventive films of the German New Wave’s “mature” period following its heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, WINGS OF DESIRE “is one of Wenders’s most stunning achievements.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (128 mins.)
Assistant direction by Claire Denis.
WINGS OF DESIRE screens on Saturday, May 11 at 2p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Claire Denis retrospective, THE LYRICAL SPACE OF CLAIRE DENIS.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here. Series passes are available here for $45 (an $109 value!).
Inspired by Herman Melville’s BILLY BUDD, BEAU TRAVAIL focuses on the lives of men in a small French Foreign Legion outpost, emphasizing the banality and ritual of their days in the scorching sun. Sergeant Galoup seems the ideal Legionnaire: a brooding loner cut off from his past. He runs the troupe like a well-oiled machine until the arrival of a new recruit threatens to upset the delicate balance. “What is really remarkable about Denis’s film is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses.”—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (93 mins.)
BEAU TRAVAIL screens on Thursday, May 9 at 7p.m. and Saturday, May 11 at 5p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Claire Denis retrospective, THE LYRICAL SPACE OF CLAIRE DENIS.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here. Series passes are available here for $45 (an $109 value!).
“Of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s short story ‘The Devil’s Drool,’ Antonioni opted to keep only the mechanism of magnification of the image hiding (perhaps) a suspicious reality, showing how far a film director can go to ‘render’ the ‘spirit’ of a literary work instead of transposing a mere plot. David Hemmings is a fashion photographer, Veruschka his favorite model, Vanessa Redgrave an elusive con woman, John Castle an abstract artist married to Vera Miles who tries to find sense in his paintings—among the many other characters all alienated from reality, all wanting to be somewhere or someone else. Both Cortázar and Antonioni chose the thriller’s style, but their search is not the whodunit but rather the ontological, the metaphysical.”—PF (111 mins.)
BLOW-UP screens on Tuesday, May 7 at 7p.m. in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum). The film is being presented as part of our Literature Into Film series.
Advanced tickets are available for purchase here.
