02/11/2015
A short walk away!
At the Harvard Film Archive
February 13 – 18, 2015
Friday February 13 at 7pm
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a poignant and realistic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's persuasive anti-war novel about seven young German soldiers facing suffering and death on the battlefields of World War I. The film focuses on one of the soldiers and follows his transformation from idealistic and patriotic schoolboy to shattered and disillusioned war veteran. Unforgettable and astonishingly graphic in its honest portrayal of horrifying subject matter, the film was met with controversy in both the United States and Germany when first released; nevertheless, it garnered both Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.
Directed by Lewis Milestone. With Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray
US 1930, 35mm, b/w, silent, 152 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/grand.html
Friday February 13 at 9:30pm
King and Country
Frustrated with three long years of trench warfare and shell-shocked after a particularly brutal attack, Private Arthur Hamp elects to walk home to London from the front. Subsequently court-martialed, Hamp’s assigned defender Captain Hargreaves slowly begins to understand the helplessness of Hamp and other enlisted men. With his characteristically subtle touch, Losey intensifies the John Wilson play by toying with the "roles" assigned by the British class system, employing a mildly Brechtian emphasis on theatrical artifice and reflexivity.
Directed by Joseph Losey. With Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay, Leo McKern
UK 1964, 35mm, b/w, 86 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/grand.html
Saturday February 14 at 7pm
A Farewell to Arms
Hemingway’s loosely autobiographical love story between a nurse and an ambulance driver became the great American novel about World War I almost as soon as it was published in 1928. From Hollywood’s perspective, Frank Borzage was the perfect director for the inevitable film adaptation; he had directed several silent films that counterposed tender love stories to the carnage of World War I. Hemingway, however, felt that Borzage’s style was much too Romantic. While it’s true that the film is more emotional than the restrained novel, Borzage’s version was further burdened by a studio-imposed happy ending and, later, several minutes’ worth of cuts when the film was re-released after the 1934 imposition of the Production Code. This restoration by UCLA restores the original ending and all the censored bits, revealing the power of Borzage’s heartfelt vision. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive; preservation funded by the Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Directed by Frank Borzage. With Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou
US 1932, 35mm, b/w, 89 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/grand.html
Saturday February 14 at 9pm
Jules and Jim
Alternately gentle and searing, Truffaut’s masterpiece follows a love triangle through the years before, during and after the war, enthusiastically portraying the giddy joys of both friendship and romantic love among two young men, one French and one German, and the woman who captivates them both. The nationality of the two title characters reveals the film’s aspirations to allegory. The war itself receives scant notice in the novel Truffaut has adapted; the film amplifies its presence and its impact on the characters to make of this ménage-a-trois an emblem for the urge to challenge social convention in the early years of the 20th century, an urge deferred by the conflict.
Directed by François Truffaut. With Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre
France 1962, 35mm, b/w, 106 min. French with English subtitles
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/grand.html
Sunday February 15 at 4pm
The Big Parade
King Vidor earned his reputation as a great director with this stunning antiwar film, now one of the classics of silent cinema. Containing realistic, remarkably staged battle sequences and moments of powerful drama, the film follows a naïve American soldier from the thrill of small-town enlistment rallies to the grim reality of trench warfare in France. Vidor skillfully weaves humor and sentiment throughout, and the film’s blend of emotion helped it become one of the most successful silent films ever. It also set the template for American films about modern warfare.
Directed by King Vidor. With John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Hobart Bosworth
US 1925, 35mm, b/w, silent, 130 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/grand.html
Sunday February 15 at 7pm
A Night of Storytelling (Oidhche Sheanchais)
A lost film until the 2013 discovery of a 35mm nitrate print at Harvard University, Robert Flaherty’s 1935 short film Oidhche Sheanchais offers a disarming and fascinating distillation of his ardent belief in cinema as a mythopoeic art and folkloric tradition. To record the soundtrack of Man of Aran Flaherty brought the principal members of his cast to London, inviting Colman “Tiger” King, Maggie Dirrane, Patch “Red Beard” Ruadh and young Michaeleen to retrospectively add dialogue, in English and in pre-Jean Rouch fashion, to select scenes of the film. During their extended stay in London Flaherty reassembled the nuclear family invented for Man of Aran for a second film commissioned by the Department of Education, gathering his four “actors” around a sound studio hearth, together with famed seanchai (story-teller) Tomas O’Diorain. In striking contrast to Man of Aran, the resultant film, Oidhche Sheanchais, was recorded entirely in the dialect of the Aran Islands and is, in fact, considered the first talkie in the Irish language. Speaking and singing in their native tongue, Dirrane, Ruadh and especially O’Diorain deliver beautifully animated performances that bring a rare intimacy to Oidhche Sheanchais, making clear Flaherty’s unique relationship to his actors and giving new human dimension to these now legendary men, woman and child of Aran.
The surging, symphonic poetry of Man of Aran is powerfully emblematized in Flaherty’s bold imagery of the restless North Atlantic whose unyielding waves and currents unceasingly threaten the fishermen’s boats and very lives. All of Flaherty’s feature films are anchored in just such a mythologization of Man locked in an eternal struggle with Nature. Oidhche Sheanchais stands apart, then, as a purely interior film, set entirely within a sound stage and without any of the lyrical nature imagery so central to Flaherty’s visionary cinema. Yet, despite its explicit interiority and literal enclosure within an artificial studio set, Oidhche Sheanchais remains, like Flaherty’s other films, an adventurous exploration of a vast, unchartered land. For Oidhche Sheanchais is, above all, a film about the interior yet fathomless world of the imagination, a limitless realm from which emerges the song and story shared by the fireside group, each a fantasy echo of central themes of Man of Aran. In this way Tom O’Diorian’s fiery telling of a well-known tale of Irish water spirits who tempt yet are ultimately tamed by an Aran fisherman, makes explicit the animistic and deeply Romantic vision of nature animating both Flaherty’s cinema and the folkloric world that so inspired him. And Maggie Dirrane’s moving rendition of the Irish ballad, recalls the longing, melancholy and even dark tragedy which defines lives dependent upon the sea.
As both a figure of a world out of time and a kind of a portal to the imagination, Oidhche Sheanchais’ minimal set also beautifully recalls the cottage hearth tended by Maggie Dirrane in Man of Aran; a miniaturized and seemingly self-sustaining world, a domestic island, with chickens and lambs warming themselves alongside the baby’s cradle while a kettle heats above the fire. An embodiment of the “infinite immensity” described by Gaston Bachelard, the hearth fire is also where young Michaeleen, in one Man of Aran’s loveliest moments, drifts to sleep, followed by a montage of images of the restless ocean that seem to spring from the boy’s dreams of joining his father’s oceanic adventure. As backdrop to O’Diorian’s spirited story-telling, the dancing shadow and flame of the hearth fire in Oidhche Sheanchais is also, of course, a figure for cinema itself, bringing a meta-cinematic dimension to Flaherty’s reanimation of ancient tradition. As Flaherty’s first work with direct sound, the film crackles with the miracle of the new technology and its ability to so vividly render the cadence and lilt of the Aran dialect spoken and sung by the actors. And yet the figure of Tiger King, the Man of Aran himself, seems still locked in another realm, standing fixed in a statuesque pose, not speaking a word, a figure then for the lost and receding world of the silent cinema.
Directed by Robert Flaherty. With Tomas O’Diorain, Maggie Dirrane, Michaeleen Dillane
Ireland 1935, 35mm, b/w, 12 min. Gaelic with English subtitles
Man of Aran
By his third film, Flaherty’s formula was well established: unsparing, process-oriented portraits of resourceful men and their clans eking out a living off the grid. This time the location of choice was the rocky seashore of Ireland, and funding was sourced from the native country. The result, Man of Aran, is a film reverent of its resilient protagonist even as it acknowledges his sure fate to one day “meet his master—the sea.” Befitting this resigned tone, Flaherty alternates furiously between the macro and the micro, intercutting God’s eye perspectives and shots from the level of his vulnerable subjects. Brisk montage editing—notably in a suspenseful sequence dramatizing a two-day attempt to capture a basking shark—is juxtaposed against more contemplative landscape imagery that emphasizes the overwhelming force of the ocean environment, always reducing its inhabitants’ dubbed voices to unintelligible wails of resistance. The gendered titles of Flaherty’s early films often bely the fact that these group portraits are equally about the women in each respective male character’s life, and in this case the protagonist’s tough wife emerges as one of the more memorable faces from Flaherty’s young career.
Directed by Robert Flaherty. With Colman “Tiger” King, Maggie Dirrane, Michaeleen Dillane
UK 1934, 16mm, b/w, 77 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/flaherty.html
$12 Special Event Tickets
Jodie Mack in person
Monday February 16 at 7pm
New Fancy Foils
Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, color, and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalog of catalogs remembers a tactile economy.
US 2013, 16mm, color, silent, 12.5 min
Undertone Overture
A study of tie dye swims out to the cosmos and back again.
US 2013, 16mm, color, 10.5 min
Dusty Stacks of Mom: the Poster Project
Interweaving the forms of personal filmmaking, abstract animation and the rock opera, this animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business; the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in commerce; and the division (or lack of) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch. Using alternate lyrics as voice over narration, the piece adopts the form of a popular rock album reinterpreted as a cine-performance.
US 2013, live performance with 16mm, color, 41 min
Glistening Thrills
A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.
US 2013, 16mm, color, 8 min
Let Your Light Shine
The ultimate photo-kinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. Requires prismatic glasses which will be provided.
US 2013, 16mm, color & b/w, 3 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/mack.html
Wednesday February 18 at 7:30pm
Taking Off
“I think we oughta change the balance of power a little bit. I’m saving up to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Milos Forman’s first American movie is a hilarious parody of the generation gap at its most gaping. A teenage girl sneaks out of the house to audition for a singing contest. Her parents, imagining that she has either run away, become a druggie, a ho**er, or joined the Manson Family, begin combing the city for her. They find other parents, also searching for their children. They end up with hundreds of others at a seminar of the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children, where their boundaries are challenged and expanded. Meanwhile, the kids are desperately trying to express their unfulfilled yearnings through music. The kids are lost. The parents are lost. An affectionate and funny film with equal empathy for both sides. Climaxes with a brilliant scene in which two middle-class NY couples play strip poker. Buck Henry (writer of The Graduate) is perfect as the confused father; Paul Benedict, Lynn Carlin and Vincent Schiavelli all enjoy memorable moments.
Directed by Milos Foreman. With Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry, Kathy Bates
US 1971, 35mm, color, 89 min
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2015janfeb/furious.html
Brittany Gravely
Publicist
Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
p 617-496-3211 / f 617-496-6750
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Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library. Copyright © 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
