Cinematheque Film Schedule

Brazil | 2016 | Eryk Rocha

The son of Glauber Rocha, director of Antonio das Mortes and Brazil’s foremost Cinema Novo filmmaker, takes an extended look of that socially, intellectually, and artistically progressive “new wave” movement of the 1960s & 1970s that changed Brazilian moviemaking. Rocha fils creates an impressionistic portrait of the era via ample film clips and interviews with the era’s other leading directors—among them, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Ruy Guerra, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, whose...

Brazil | 1969 | Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

This wild, colorful, sardonic folktale—one of the key works of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (see 2/1 at 6:45)—was a huge box office hit in its native country (where it was partially censored). It tells of a black man, Macunaíma, who is born as a fully formed adult to an old woman in the Amazonian jungle. Macunaíma miraculously turns white on his way to the big city, where he has a series of outlandish, grotesque adventures involving...

France | 1958 | Jean Rouch

Jean Rouch’s first great feature was a major influence on the French New Wave. (It introduced jump cuts and employed non-professional “actors.”) Set in the Ivory Coast, the movie focuses on two Nigerian immigrants nicknamed Edward G. Robinson and Eddie Constantine who try to find work as dockworkers while living in a squalid section of Abidjan. Moi, un Noir will be preceded at 7:30 by Rouch’s groundbreaking short film The Mad Masters (Les maîtres fou,...

United States | 1945 | Michael Curtiz

Joan Crawford stars in one of the great noir melodramas, a gripping tale of an impoverished woman turned entrepreneur who will do almost anything to keep her spoiled older daughter happy. Crawford won the Oscar. From a James M. Cain novel. DCP. 111 min.

Israel | 2017 | Shady Srour

In this deadpan new comedy, a Christian Arab living in Nazareth with his pregnant wife and dying father decides to make some money by bottling and selling air from the Holy Land. But first he must get the blessing of the city’s three ruling parties: Jewish politicians, Muslim mobsters, and Catholic Church officials. “A wry commentary on religious tourism…Tartly effective.” –L.A. Times. “The bone-dry wit is breathtaking.” –Village Voice. Subtitles. DCP. 81 min.

France, Switzerland | 1991 | Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette’s celebrated, four-hour epic that dissects the artistic process has been newly restored and re-released! Michel Piccoli plays a long dormant painter who returns to an unfinished canvas, his magnum opus, after convincing a beautiful, headstrong young woman (Emmanuelle Béart) to model nude for him. Jane Birkin plays the painter’s former model, now his wife. “The best film I have ever seen about the physical creation of art.” –Roger Ebert. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles....

United States | 1945 | Michael Curtiz

Joan Crawford stars in one of the great noir melodramas, a gripping tale of an impoverished woman turned entrepreneur who will do almost anything to keep her spoiled older daughter happy. Crawford won the Oscar. From a James M. Cain novel. DCP. 111 min.

Brazil | 1969 | Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

This wild, colorful, sardonic folktale—one of the key works of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (see 2/1 at 6:45)—was a huge box office hit in its native country (where it was partially censored). It tells of a black man, Macunaíma, who is born as a fully formed adult to an old woman in the Amazonian jungle. Macunaíma miraculously turns white on his way to the big city, where he has a series of outlandish, grotesque adventures involving...

Israel | 2017 | Shady Srour

In this deadpan new comedy, a Christian Arab living in Nazareth with his pregnant wife and dying father decides to make some money by bottling and selling air from the Holy Land. But first he must get the blessing of the city’s three ruling parties: Jewish politicians, Muslim mobsters, and Catholic Church officials. “A wry commentary on religious tourism…Tartly effective.” –L.A. Times. “The bone-dry wit is breathtaking.” –Village Voice. Subtitles. DCP. 81 min.

France | 1956 | Jean-Pierre Melville

A dapper ex-gangster who is now a compulsive gambler decides to knock off a casino. Jean-Pierre Melville’s first film noir, evocatively shot in the Montmartre district of Paris, is one of his key works, and had a major impact on the young filmmakers of the French New Wave. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 98 min.

South Korea | 2017 | Hong Sang-soo

A Korean actress having an affair with a married film director, but temporarily separated from him in a foreign city, ponders her feelings about the affair and also wonders about his love for her. South Korean master Hong Sang-soo (who has carried on a scandalous affair with Kim Min-hee, the star of this movie, for two years now) mines his own life more deeply than usual for his acclaimed, self-reflective, and often unsparing new work....

South Korea | 2017 | Hong Sang-soo

A Korean actress having an affair with a married film director, but temporarily separated from him in a foreign city, ponders her feelings about the affair and also wonders about his love for her. South Korean master Hong Sang-soo (who has carried on a scandalous affair with Kim Min-hee, the star of this movie, for two years now) mines his own life more deeply than usual for his acclaimed, self-reflective, and often unsparing new work....

France | 1956 | Jean-Pierre Melville

A dapper ex-gangster who is now a compulsive gambler decides to knock off a casino. Jean-Pierre Melville’s first film noir, evocatively shot in the Montmartre district of Paris, is one of his key works, and had a major impact on the young filmmakers of the French New Wave. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 98 min.

United States | 1964-2012 | various directors

Here’s the third of four programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, a longtime San Francisco-based distributor of truly independent, often experimental short works by major American filmmakers. Decodings is named after Michael Wallin’s 1988 found-footage masterpiece, “a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory” (Manohla Dargis). The program begins with Lawrence Jordan’s Duo Concertantes (1964), a classic animation by one of Canyon’s earliest filmmakers, and Will Hindle’s Billabong...

Finland | 2017 |

A Syrian refugee hooks up with a novice Helsinki restaurateur in the deadpan, very funny, heartfelt new comedy from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki. Like his previous movie Le Havre, Kaurismäki’s latest shows the human side of the European refugee crisis. “This is a world that reeks of cigarette smoke and cheap vodka, yet as always in the work of Finland's maestro of droll melancholy, the perfume that lingers longest is empathy.” –Hollywood Reporter. Shot...

Great Britain | 1946 | Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

This imaginative, one-of-a-kind color fantasy/love story is one of Powell and Pressburger’s greatest films. Set during WWII, it tells of an RAF pilot (David Niven) who bales out of his flaming plane without a parachute and suddenly finds himself pleading for his life before a heavenly tribunal. Arguing that his time has not yet come, he finds an ardent ally in a female American radio operator (Kim Hunter). Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 104 min.

Great Britain | 1946 | Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

This imaginative, one-of-a-kind color fantasy/love story is one of Powell and Pressburger’s greatest films. Set during WWII, it tells of an RAF pilot (David Niven) who bales out of his flaming plane without a parachute and suddenly finds himself pleading for his life before a heavenly tribunal. Arguing that his time has not yet come, he finds an ardent ally in a female American radio operator (Kim Hunter). Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 104 min.

France | 1961 | Jean Rouch

Black and white high school seniors at a French school in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, play themselves in Jean Rouch’s experimental narrative about how the arrival of a new European white girl affects the school’s interpersonal and racial dynamics. Rouch also lets the students watch his rushes and comment on the movie in process. “Groundbreaking metafiction.” –The New Yorker. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 93 min.

Finland | 2017 |

A Syrian refugee hooks up with a novice Helsinki restaurateur in the deadpan, very funny, heartfelt new comedy from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki. Like his previous movie Le Havre, Kaurismäki’s latest shows the human side of the European refugee crisis. “This is a world that reeks of cigarette smoke and cheap vodka, yet as always in the work of Finland's maestro of droll melancholy, the perfume that lingers longest is empathy.” –Hollywood Reporter. Shot...

Denmark | 2017 |

Acclaimed, innovative Danish “starchitect” Bjarke Ingels, who heads the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in New York City (where he has designed the forthcoming Two World Trade Center tower), is profiled in this new documentary shot over a six year period. The film celebrates Ingels’ visionary genius while also showing the compromises he sometimes must make and illustrating the toll success has taken on his personal life. Cleveland premiere. DCP. 93 min.

Portugal | 2016 | Gabe Klinger

The late Anton Yelchin stars in this moody, stylish, elegiac film by former film critic Gabe Klinger. Employing flashbacks, flash-forwards, and multiple motion picture formats (8mm, 16mm, 35mm), this movie deconstructs a one-night stand in Oporto, Portugal, between an American drifter and a French archaeology student. Produced by Jim Jarmusch. “A film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.” –Variety. Cleveland premiere. 76 min.

Japan | 2017 | Akihiko Shiota

Japan’s Nikkatsu studio is marking the 45th anniversary of the “Roman Porno” genre (softcore pornographic films that sustained the studio through the 1970s and 1980s) with five newly commissioned, sexy, low-budget quickies. Wet Woman in the Wind, the first of them, is an amusing, arousing tale of a fed-up Tokyo playwright who swears off romance and goes on a solitary retreat in the country. But his solitude is soon shattered by a libidinous young woman...

United States | 1929 | King Vidor

The first Hollywood film with an all-black cast “has fair claim to being the first masterpiece of the sound era” (Macmillan Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers). Director King Vidor, who grew up in Texas, worked without a salary to bring his long-cherished tale of southern black folk (and their music and culture) to the screen, shooting the movie in Tennessee and Arkansas. Despite Vidor’s good intentions and the work’s many commendable attributes (performances, songs, cinematography),...

Portugal | 2001 | Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira, the great, durable Portuguese film director who finally died in 2015 at age 106, remembers his childhood in the Portuguese coastal city of Porto/Oporto in this short feature made when he was 93. Mixing documentary footage with reenactments of decades-old memories, the movie features such Oliveira regulars as Ricardo Trêpa and Maria de Medeiros, as well as the director himself. “Poignant and playful…One of the old master's most accessible late films.” –Time...

Portugal | 2016 | Gabe Klinger

The late Anton Yelchin stars in this moody, stylish, elegiac film by former film critic Gabe Klinger. Employing flashbacks, flash-forwards, and multiple motion picture formats (8mm, 16mm, 35mm), this movie deconstructs a one-night stand in Oporto, Portugal, between an American drifter and a French archaeology student. Produced by Jim Jarmusch. “A film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.” –Variety. Cleveland premiere. 76 min.

Japan | 2017 | Akihiko Shiota

Japan’s Nikkatsu studio is marking the 45th anniversary of the “Roman Porno” genre (softcore pornographic films that sustained the studio through the 1970s and 1980s) with five newly commissioned, sexy, low-budget quickies. Wet Woman in the Wind, the first of them, is an amusing, arousing tale of a fed-up Tokyo playwright who swears off romance and goes on a solitary retreat in the country. But his solitude is soon shattered by a libidinous young woman...

United States | 1929 | King Vidor

The first Hollywood film with an all-black cast “has fair claim to being the first masterpiece of the sound era” (Macmillan Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers). Director King Vidor, who grew up in Texas, worked without a salary to bring his long-cherished tale of southern black folk (and their music and culture) to the screen, shooting the movie in Tennessee and Arkansas. Despite Vidor’s good intentions and the work’s many commendable attributes (performances, songs, cinematography),...

France | 1961 | Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin

Jean Rouch’s most celebrated documentary that’s not set in Africa finds the anthropologist-filmmaker teaming up with sociologist Edgar Morin to take the pulse of Parisians during 1960. They convene a group of diverse interviewees and ask them if they are happy—before delving into other questions. Later they let their subjects comment on their own screen appearances, gauging how authentic and realistic they are. A seminal work of cinéma vérité. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. Blu-ray. 90...

France | 1966 | Jean Rouch

In this Jean Rouch ethnographic classic that was shot on the border between Niger and Mali over a period of seven years, five African tribesmen undertake the ritual preparations for a lion hunt (they include incantations and dancing). Their quarry is a powerful beast, nicknamed “the American,” who has been stalking the bush and killing cows. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 81 min.

Cuba | 1968 |

The first feature film from Castro’s Cuba to be widely acclaimed and seen in the U.S. is now five decades old. Memories of Underdevelopment focuses on an affluent Cuban intellectual and writer who stays behind in Havana after his wife, family, and friends escape to Miami in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Alienated from Cuba’s revolution, but fascinated by the changes and recent historical events he is witnessing, he spends his time...

France | 1952 |

Here’s a new digital restoration of one of the most shattering pacifist films ever made! Set in WWII France, the movie tells of a five-year-old French orphan girl and an 11-year-old peasant boy who together engage in private, war-inspired play involving the burial of dead animals and the theft of crosses from a local churchyard. “Perhaps the greatest war film since La Grande Illusion.” –Pauline Kael. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 86 min.

United States | 1968-2005 | various directors

The last of four programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, a longtime San Francisco-based distributor of truly independent, often experimental short works by major American filmmakers. This show is named for Dominic Angerame’s exquisitely filmed, silent, black and white 1987 city portrait. Also showing: Bay Area filmmaker Karen Holmes’ late 1970s landscape and performance film Saving the Proof; Los Angeles effects artist and filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1973 masterpiece Down Wind; Gunvor Nelson’s My...

France | 1952 |

Here’s a new digital restoration of one of the most shattering pacifist films ever made! Set in WWII France, the movie tells of a five-year-old French orphan girl and an 11-year-old peasant boy who together engage in private, war-inspired play involving the burial of dead animals and the theft of crosses from a local churchyard. “Perhaps the greatest war film since La Grande Illusion.” –Pauline Kael. Cleveland revival premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 86 min.

United States | 1990 | Martin Scorsese

Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci star in Martin Scorsese’s modern crime classic about the rise and fall of an Italian-American “wiseguy” who works for the Mob between 1955 and 1980. Never before shown at the Cinematheque! Adults only! DCP. 146 min.

Germany | 1930 | G.W. Pabst

Released one month after the better-known All Quiet on the Western Front, the first sound film by the celebrated German director of Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora’s Box is grimmer and more powerful than that Lewis Milestone WWI classic. Like All Quiet, Pabst’s film follows a German soldier during the final days of the Great War, fighting in the trenches, going home for a brief but dispiriting leave, and returning to the front’s...

France | 1968 | Jean Rouch

In one of Jean Rouch’s most disarming “ethnofictions,” three young men from Niger leave their homeland to find work and opportunity in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Originally filmed in the 1950s, with dialogue, sound, and the participants’ commentary added a few years later, this improvisational narrative constitutes a playful collaboration between all four men. Cleveland revival premiere! Subtitles. DCP. 93 min.

Cuba | 1968 |

The first feature film from Castro’s Cuba to be widely acclaimed and seen in the U.S. is now five decades old. Memories of Underdevelopment focuses on an affluent Cuban intellectual and writer who stays behind in Havana after his wife, family, and friends escape to Miami in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Alienated from Cuba’s revolution, but fascinated by the changes and recent historical events he is witnessing, he spends his time...