This year's edition of the ever-eclectic Film Comment Selects festival continues into the weekend with a wide array of films from inventive horror to engrossing documentaries and screwball comedies.

Today starts with a second showing of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish, a delightful story about two brothers trying to unite their separated parents with an unusual but ingenious plan. Later in the day we’ll be screening two comedies by David Wain, who first came into the limelight with the cult film Wet Hot American Summer. Last year's buddy comedy Role Models will follow Wain’s latest film Wanderlust (currently standby-only), a hilarious look at a Manhattan couple played by Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston who decide to live in an eccentric hippie community in Atlanta after George suddenly loses his job. Director David Wain, actors Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, Kerri Kenney and Ken Marino will participate in a post-screening Q&A after the film!

On Thursday, don’t miss the chance to see Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, his first English-language film starring Dirk Bogarte as a chocolate manufacturer who begins to devise a plan for his own disappearance to escape Germany’s political unrest and economic grievances. Headhunters is a slick new thriller about a recruitment specialistturned art thief who risks everything when he steals a painting from a fellow headhunter. The creators of the chilling high-concept horror Open Water (2003) are back with Silent House, in which Elizabeth Olsen finds herself trapped inside her family’s lakeside cabin as forces unknown come to disturb her. Based on the Uruguayan film La Casa Muda (2010), Silent House is presented as one continuous take that allows the audience to experience the terrifying events in real time. Directors Laura Lau and Chris Kentis will be in person for Q&A after the February 25 screening.

Matt Damon and Anna Paquin in Margaret (2011)

One of last year’s most talked-about but least-seen films, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, which was number 20 in Film Comment’s list of the Best Released Films of 2011, screens Saturday at 7:15pm (standby only). Shot in 2005 but plagued by disagreements between Lonergan and the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, Margaret is a touching post-9/11 New York drama about a young girl who endures emotional turmoil after witnessing the death of a pedestrian hit by a bus. Kenneth Lonergan and cast members will be in person for a post-screening conversation.

On Sunday, the festival offers a rare chance to see filmmaker and UCSD professor Jean-Pierre Gorin’s “Southern California Trilogy:” three documentaries about the inhabitants and the city of San Diego. Famous for his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard, Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo (7:15pm), Routine Pleasures (5:30pm), and My Crasy Life (3:30pm) will be screened back-to-back.

Film Comment Selects runs through March 1. Visit the festival page for a complete schedule, tickets, and more info, and save with a four-film pass, starting at just $28 for members!

One of the most personal and crowd-pleasing films of the great François Truffaut’s late career, the dazzlingly subversive wartime melodrama The Last Metro (Le dernier métro) will screen tonight at 6:00pm as part of our ongoing series 50 Years at the New York Film Festival. Coming from the 18th edition of the festival in 1980, the film stars our upcoming Chaplin Award Gala honoree Catherine Deneuve in one of her greatest performances as the wife of a Jewish theater director in Nazi-occupied Paris.

The story is based on a Theatre Montmarte production in 1942—a time when both Paris and the theatre were under the heavy surveillance of Vichy collaborators—and focuses on the different troupe members’ more intimate and peculiar acts of valor. Though The Last Metro has the form of a more or less conventional melodrama, it discreetly refuses to exercise its melodramatic options, and also scarcely recognizes the lovers of the love story. The film became one of Truffaut’s biggest "hits," earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film and 10 French César awards, including Best Film, Best Actor and Best Actress.

Reviewing the film upon it’s inital NYFF screening in the fall of 1980, The New York Times wrote; “The Last Metro is about lives surrounded by melodrama, being lived with as little outward fuss as possible—the courage goes without saying, or is acknowledged only obliquely.” 

For more information on our 50 Years of the New York Film Festival series, including new editions to the lineup by Clint Eastwood, Andrei Tarkovsky, Raul Ruiz and Michael Moore, as well as tickets and showtimes, click here.

Below is a full list of all the films that played alongside The Last Metro at the NYFF '80!
Melvin and Howard
Jonathan Demme, USA, 1980. 

The Handyman (L’homme a tour faire) 
Micheline Lanctót, Canada, 1980.  

Masoch– The Confessions of Wanda Van Sacher Masoch
Franco Brogi Taviani , Italy, 1980.

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter 
Connie Field, USA, 1980. 

Bye Bye Brasil
Carlos Diegues, Brazil, 1980 

The Orchestra Conductor (Dyrygent)
Andrzej Wajda, Poland., 1980

Special Treatment (Poseban tretman)
Goran Paskalejević, Yugoslavia/USA.

Confidence (Bizalom)
István Szabó, Hungary, 1979

One Day Like Another (Ekdin pratidin)
Mrinal Sen, India, 1980

Handicapped Love (Behinderte liebe)
Marlies Graf, Switzerland, 1979

Sunday Daughters (VASÁRNAPI  SZÜLŐK)
István Kardos, Hungary, 1980

Camera Buff (Amator)
Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland, 1979

Europa 51
Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1952
(A NYFF Retrospective)

The Martin Scorsese Color Show:  Once Upon a Time in The West, (C’era una volta il west)
Sergio Leone, Italy, 1969.
*(Presented as part of Scorsese’s campaign for preservation of color films)

The Color of Pomegranates
Sergei Paradjanov, Armenia, 1969-72

Kagamusha (The Shadow Warrior)
Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1980

Everyman for Himself (Sauve qui peut/la vie) 
Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland, 1980

Loulou
Maurice Pialat, France, 1980

The Constant Factor (Constans)
Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland, 1980

Tih Minh
Louis Feillade, France, 1918
(A NYFF Retrospective – in a sense, a continuation of Les Vampires)

A Program of Three Featurettes:
New York Story
Jackie Raynal, USA, 1980
Rush
Evelyn Purcell, USA 1980
Night at O'Rears
Robert Mandel, USA,1980

SPECIAL EVENT:  BRITISH FILM NOW
Gamekeeper, Ken Loach
Bad Timing, Nicolas Roeg
Long Shot, Maurice Hatton
Moon Over the Alley, Chuck Despins 
The Tempest, Derek Jarman;
Bleak Moments, Mike Leigh
Bloody Kids, Stephen Frears;
The Bill Douglas Trilogy, Richard Woolley
Brothers and Sisters, Richard Woolley

Keep your enfants terribles occupied in March and April with a slate of French-flavored family films scheduled to coincide with our fast-selling annual program Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Part of Rendez-Vous itself (March 1 – 13) are Zarafa and The Painting, two gorgeous animated films released in France last year. Zarafa, beautifully hand-drawn, opens as a grandfather tells his grandchildren about a boy determined to save a trapped giraffe from her fate as a gift to a king. The Painting is the exceedingly clever story of the occupants of a painting, some only partially finished. (Zarafa is in French with English subtitles, which, as with all of the subtitled films in the series, will be presented with the subtitles read aloud.)

Wolf (Loup) follows a 16-year-old boy who is cast out of his clan when he refuses to kill a wolf and forges a surprising friendship (subtitled). In On the Sly (A pas de loup), it’s a young girl who leaves her family and considers starting over in a lush new world (subtitled).

Classics are also on hand: experience musicals An American in Paris (1951), with Gene Kelly, and the Oscar-sweeping Gigi (1958). Further down the line, do Cousteau for Earth Day with World Without Sun (Le monde sans soleil), the Oscar-winning tale of “oceanauts” who take up residence on the floor of the Red Sea. 

Explore the full lineup of new titles here, along with age recommendations. As always, tickets to our Family FIlms are just $6 (for everyone!) and if you bring your ticket stub to Indie Food & Wine you can get their special, kid-friendly Indie Lunch box for just $6 more!

Keep the kids entertained this weekend and throughout the February break. Our ongoing Family Films series has daily screenings all week in the Film Center's Amphitheater and tickets are only $6... for everyone!

The delightful offerings start Sunday with Manuelita (also playing 2/25), based on a popular Argentinian children’s song. After getting lost on a balloon trip, a young turtle's journey home is full of new adventures, new friendships and fun songs! This film is perfect for our youngest viewers.

Of The Great Bear (Monday – Friday) , Twitch Film’s Todd Brown writes: “the concept is stellar and the world these characters are moving in quite compelling.” Jonathan tries to avoid his little sister Sophie when they spend the summer at their grandfather’s house situated near a mythical forest. But when Sophie is kidnapped by a 1000-year-old giant bear, Jonathan must venture into the forest to find her. The Pixar-style animation of this Danish delight offers the audience a visual celebration of the beauty of forests and their animal inhabitants.

Body Troopers aka Chasing The Kidneystone (Sunday and 2/26) takes a unique approach to teaching today’s young minds about science and the human body. As eight year old Simon shrinks himself down to destroy his grandfather’s kidney stone, he is joined by a white blood cell to fight the evil Calcium Crystals. 

Based on the classic children's books written by Anne Cath Vestly, Twigson and its sequel Twigson Ties The Knot (Monday – Friday) tell the tale of young Lillebror ("little brother") and his animated twig friend Twigson. These Norwegian family favorites are great examples of a child’s imagination at work.

Another great option for the whole family this weekend is The Black Stallion (NYFF '79), which plays Saturday as part of our ongoing celebration of 50 Years of the New York Film Festival. Carroll Ballard's beloved film is being presented as a family matinee, with kids tickets only $6. From the NYFF17 program notes: "The first volume of Walter Farley’s classic series about a boy and his wild Arabian horse has been made into a cinematic tour de force that recalls the old Saturday matinee features."

Don't forget to save your ticket stub and head to Indie Food and Wine after the show to enjoy their "indie lunch box" featuring a NY State cheddar grilled cheese sandwich on multi-grain bread with an apple and house-made hot chocolate, all for only $6!

The quintessential tale of a boy and his horse, The Black Stallion screens Saturday at 11am in a special 50 Years of the New York Film Festival family matinee at the Walter Reade Theater.

Although now widely regarded as a classic, The Black Stallion came to NYFF in 1979 with an uncertain future; United Artists, its distributor, didn’t show much interest in it. But after it screened at the festival, positive notices started to roll in, and it went on to a leggy box office run and two Academy Award nominations (though, puzzlingly, not one for its spectacular cinematography). Roger Ebert named the film the best of 1980, and Pauline Kael wrote it was "proof that even children who have grown up with television and may never have been exposed to a good movie can respond to the real thing when they see it."

Based on the first of a long series of books by Walter Farley, the film picturesquely chronicles the relationship between a boy and his iconic stallion, initially after they are shipwrecked on an island together and eventually on the racetrack. The simple story resonated profoundly enough to inspire a sequel, prequel, television adaptation and myriad imitators in the years that followed.

Come see a magnificent 35mm print this weekend, with tickets just $6 for kids (children 4-12 should be occupied by an adult). And don’t forget to check out our ongoing Family Films series, with daily screenings throughout the February school break and more titles coming soon.

Below is a full list of all the films that played alongside The Black Stallion at the NYFF in 1979:
Luna
Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/USA, 1979

The Golden Coach
Jean Renoir, Italy/ France, 1953

The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie
Chuck Jones, USA, 1979

Black Jack
Ken Loach, UK, 1979

WIse Blood
John Houston, USA, 1979

Short Memory (La Memoire Courte)
Eduardo de Gregorio, France/Belgium, 1979

Angi Vera
Pál Gabor, Hungary, 1979

Nosferatu, The Vampyre 
Werner Herzog, West Germany/USA, 1978

Mad Wednesday
Preston Sturges, USA, 1950

Scarface
Howard Hawks, USA, 1932

The Europeans
James Ivory, UK, 1979

Molière
Ariane Mnouchkine, France, 1978

Best Boy
Ira Wohl, USA, 1979

Other People's Money (L'argent des autres)
Christian de Chalonge, France, 1978

Alexandria... Why? (Askandrie...Lie?)
Youssef Chahine, Egypt/Algeria, 1978

My Brilliant Career
Gill Armstrong, Australia, 1979

Primal Fear (Mourir à tue-tête)
Jan-Marie Martell Canada, 1978  

In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem jahr mit 13 monden) 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979

Without Anesthesia
Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1978

The Wobblies
Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, USA, 1979

The Young Girls of Wilko (Panny z Wilka)
Andrzej Wajda, Poland/France, 1979

Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, UK, 1959

The Marriage of Maria Braun 
Rauber Wrber Fassvubder, West Germany, 1978

SPECIAL EVENT: AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS
Film shown were:  The Cold World, Shirley Clarke; Heartland, Richard Pearce; Trash, Paul Morissey; Ice, Robert Kramer; Glen and Randa, Jim McBride; Alambrista (The Illegal), Robert M.Young; Badlands, Terence Malick; Gal Yung Un, Victor Nuñez; Killer's Kiss & The Brig, Stanley Kubrick; Bush Mania, Haile Gerima; Crazy Quilt, John Korty; Northern Lights, Jon Hanson and Rob Nilsson; Sweet Sweetbck's Badasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles; Scenic Route, Mark Rappaport.

And if you really do have questions, director Eric Atlan will be in-person for both shows.

Two more months of our special 50 Years of the New York Film Festival anniversary series have been set, appropriately covering the 80s in alternatively gaudy and clear-eyed fashion.

Rounding out this latest batch is Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), the director’s angry, angering debut about the collapse of his hometown of Flint, MI after its blue-collar GM backbone collapsed. For anyone who laments our current political climate, the movie proves it’s hardly new by evoking a lost "middle class" with both honest sentiment and unmistakable fury. Moore himself will be in person for a Q&A after the screening on April 24!

Clint Eastwood, a figure who recently has been part of a similar conversation, will also be featured with Bird (1988), his remarkable portrait of the saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird” Parker (Forest Whitaker) and his first film to be featured in the New York Film Festival. 

Elsewhere, the series will include several master filmmakers who were common sights at NYFF. Maurice Pialat, the subject of a complete FilmLinc retrospective upon his death in 2003, will be remembered with his complex Police (1986), starring a never-better Gérard Depardieu. A regular here in the 70s and 80s, Krzystof Zanussi will be represented with the wartime romance A Year of the Quiet Sun (1985), the story of an American in Poland investigating Nazi war crimes who falls wordlessly in love with a local.

Cited as his favorite film among his outrageously prolific oeuvre, Jackie Chan will take back the Walter Reade Theater with Police Story (1987), his breathtaking return to Hong Kong after an early, failed attempt to break into Hollywood. The film will be co-presented by the New York Asian Film Festival.

Check out the updated lineup of 50 Years of the New York Film Festival. Members can purchase a four-film package to the series for just $24 (become a member)—the pass is good for all titles listed and others that will be announced in the coming months, leading up to the landmark 50th edition of the festival this fall!

Images courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

Film Comment Selects 2012 rolls on with a special in-person presentation Sunday night by James Franco: My Own Private River, a re-working of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, featuring the performance that proved to be River Phoenix’s apotheosis, as the Seattle hustler who loves and then loses slumming rich kid Scott (Keanu Reeves). After watching the film’s dailies and outtakes with Van Sant, Franco edited together a new version combining footage from the original film and its unused residue. Film Comment spoke with James Franco about making the dreamlike portrait of Phoenix and the character he incarnated.

What drew you to My Own Private Idaho, and in particular River Phoenix's performance?

The movie was such a big part of my teenage years, and helped me find my identity in some ways. For instance, when I was younger, I tried to dress like River’s character. There is something about the sensitivity, the sadness mixed with quirkiness, the tragic situation that also had a comedic flair to it. His performance almost feels like a cross between James Dean and Charlie Chaplin. In addition to River’s performance, I am just drawn to the movie itself and its direction. It’s very much a collage of different styles, different stories. It has aspects of Henry IV in there, but then these very realistic portrayals of street kids and prostitutes. It has trained actors and non actors. It’s a road movie, it has aspects of Western films. Everything.

How did My Own Private River come about?

We did a lot of premieres when we were promoting Milk––in San Francisco, New York, L.A. Gus [Van Sant] also wanted to do a special premiere in Portland as a fundraiser for an organization for homeless youth that he works with. I guess by that point all the other actors got busy or were burned out on premieres, so nobody was going to go. I would've gone anyway, but he sweetened the deal by promising to give me a tour of all the locations they used for My Own Private Idaho. And after spending a whole day seeing them, he said in a very causal way, “Oh you know I have all the editor's reels of My Own Private Idaho.” For me, that was like he just told me that he had buried treasure! So two months later I went back to Portland and we spent a few days watching as many of those reels as we could.

At one point he said, “You know, its really weird. This is the process I go through when I'm getting ready to edit, and it's making me want to re-cut this.” In the back of my mind I’m dying thinking “Yes! That would be amazing!” But then he explained how expensive it would be to properly digitize the film, and how he didn't have the money to do that. So afterwards, I proposed it as a project for the Gagosian Gallery in L.A. and got Gucci to fund the digitizing. Then came the big moment where I humbly asked Gus if I could edit my own version. The original plan was that he would edit one version, and that I would edit another. His only condition was that if he didn’t like what I did, I couldn't show it to anybody, and I agreed. I think he probably thought he really was going to say that, and that it would never see the light of day.

So with that hanging over your head and hundreds of hours of footage to go through, what was the editing process like?

I spent an entire summer on it, while I was in Vancouver shooting Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That first moment of seeing all the footage in my computer on Final Cut was just mind-blowing, because it’s such an important movie for me. To have the raw material there that I could manipulate was just—I don’t know, it was like seeing the raw material of your dreams or something. It was incredible. But at first I was a little hesitant because of the amount of respect that I have for everyone involved with the original. For this project, I had to be an actor editing another actor’s work. I thought, “Gosh, maybe this isn’t my place to edit this material. Who do I think I am?”

To justify it to myself, I went back to those conversations Gus and I had, and thinking about what if he was editing this movie now. In a way it was like I was playing Gus—it wasn't James trying to impose his ideas. This really helped to guide the editing process. As you’ll see, there are very few cuts or shot/reverse shot patterns in the movie. Another thing that guided this project was how the original My Own Private Idaho script came together. It actually was a compilation of three previously written scripts: one used the Henry IV Hal/Falstaff characters more prominently and was about updating Shakespeare; another was called In a Blue Funk about two kids looking for their parents; and the last one was about street kids in Portland. So when I cut My Own Private River, I decided that I would cut out the Shakespeare sections and give it a more documentary kind of feel. Because those were a lot of Gus’s early ideas––even up until the last minute he had even intended to use non-actors in River's and Keanu’s roles.

After watching the raw footage, did you gain a better sense of who River Phoenix was as both an actor and as a person you idolized growing up?

You know, there’s that murky area where you say, “Is that River, is that the character?” I’m sure people close to River would say that it’s a character. But I’ve also heard stories that Gus gave River a ton of freedom, and I can see it in all the takes. You can see that he was doing each one slightly differently, and had a lot of freedom to create that role. So maybe it’s not necessarily River if you ever met him in a casual situation, but you could see what his artistic input was, what types of input he gave. So whatever that is, I'm drawn to it. I was drawn to it when I was younger, and I’m drawn to it now.

You mentioned Charlie Chaplin and James Dean. Could you talk about Phoenix’s performance in terms of that physicality?

Gus says that River hated the comparisons to James Dean, and, at least while they were shooting the movie, claimed that he had never seen any of James Dean's films. But there’s a connection that is undeniable, whether he came up to it in a roundabout way or actually had seen Dean's work. The quirkiness is also part of that, because James Dean actually did have a really quirky side, and I think that’s one of the secrets to the performance that River brought to the role. You might look at this role on paper and think, “All right, it’s a guy who lives on the streets who has sex for money. He doesn’t know where his parents are, and he’s emotionally isolated. Wow, that’s really depressing!” But because River brought the quirkiness, it has this whole other life to it. It embraces the subject matter, but has another level to it.

A lot of your work deals with masculinity, be it performances you’ve done or some of the shorts that you’ve shot. What draws you to that subject and how do you feel that interest has informed this project?

Masculinity informs this project mainly because it seems like it’s a subject Gus deals with a lot as well. Forming identities and certainly forming identities at specific ages. A lot of Gus’s work focuses on people in their teenage years because it is a time of great change, a time of discovery, a time of forming one’s own identity. So when you say masculinity, that is a kind of identity. In the original film there’s the famous scene that Gus says River wrote, where the Keanu and River characters are at the campfire. River’s character professes his love to Keanu’s character and then they sort of come together but not really. Keanu’s characters says he only has sex with men for money, and I don’t know if that has to do with masculinity as much as with straight or gay or whatever, but those kind of identity issues are built into the material.

Film Comment Selects gets underway tomorrow with a packed, eclectic slate that journeys from a Pink Floyd concert in the ruins of Pompeii to the villages of Northern Albania to real-life brothels across the globe. And that’s just this weekend!

Get started tomorrow with the Golden Lion-winning new adaptation if Goethe's Faust, an ingenious reinvention of the classic tale that sparked heated debate at the Venice Film Festival. Stay later that night for Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, a revival of the 1982 feature that features a bizarre, one-of-a-kind performance by the band in an otherwise empty amphitheater made of stone.

On Saturday, we’ll feature Joshua Marston’s first film since Maria Full of Grace (2004), The Forgiveness of Blood, which this time finds the American director looking at how a blood grudge affects a family in Northern Albania (director and stars in person!). My Own Private River is James Franco’s recut version of Gus Van Sant’s classic My Own Private Idaho with new footage, accompanied by a related exhibit in the Furman Gallery (Franco in person!). Whores’ Glory fashions a plain-stated lens into the lives of prostitutes in many of the world’s most notorious red-light districts. 

Also featured in the festival’s early days is Life is Sweet, Mike Leigh’s breakthrough feature unavailable on DVD in the United States. (The screening is a tribute to our late friend and colleague Bingham Ray, who released the film as the inaugural feature from his company October Films.) And don’t miss a restored print of Le sauvage, a screwball Catherine Deneuve classic from 1975 that plays ahead of our planned Chaplin Award ceremony honoring Deneuve in April.

Head here for the complete lineup this weekend and for the entire festival, which runs through March 1. Four-film passes start at just $28 for members!

On the tail of a long-overdue first Academy Award nomination for his remarkable performance as the tenacious George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Gary Oldman stopped by Film Society of Lincoln Center for an illustrated discussion of his prolific and extraordinary career with Program Director Richard Peña.

Since his explosive breakout in Mike Leigh's TV drama Meantime in 1984, Gary Oldman has come to be known as an "actor's actor," an artist of extraordinary versatility who completely incarnates every role he's asked to play. "I don’t seek out roles," Oldman told the packed Walter Reade Theater, "my whole career, I’ve been invited, in a way."

Throughout his career, Oldman has tackled such iconic characters as Sid Vicious, Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven, and Dracula, as well as scene-stealing offbeat character roles like those in True Romance and The Fifth Element. "Acting is a bit like standing at the foot of a mountain," he said. "You come in knowing what is required of you, and then you look up at the peak and realize that you’re gonna have to get all the way up there."

In addition to providing insight into his own distinctive characters, Oldman also detailed what it was like working with directors who have larger-than-life personalities (Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Tony Scott, and Chris Nolan to name a few). Providing impersonations of each, he said no matter the talent, good directing is knowing when not to say something. "When you can see something going, and see something cooking, you have to let it happen."

Acting still breaks down into basic elements for Oldman. “Acting is not intellectual, it's a sensation. It's a feeling,” he said. “I try to create an ambiance or mood for a character and use music to determine how the character sounds—that’s where I start.”

If you missed this unforgettable converation, you can watch complete video of it below. Tickets to this sold-out event were made available to Film Society members and patrons before going on sale to the general public. To receive these and other great benefits, become a member or patron today by visiting the Support section of our site.

Below is a quick look at the schedule. For more information, visit the festival page or download a PDF of the full brochure.

Like many indie filmmakers, Errol Morris was racing against the clock as the premiere of his first film loomed. A finished print of the movie was so late in arriving for the 1978 New York Film Festival that he recalled standing in the bowels of Lincoln Center feeding fresh reels of his movie to the projectionist as they were rushed up to the booth from the DuArt film processing lab.

Smiling in an orange sweater on stage at the Walter Reade Theater last week following a screening of Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris reflected on his first trip to Lincoln Center with the film more than 30 years ago.

After the 1978 showing, he said he got what is still his favorite audience question. It was actually more of a comment.

"This movie would be better cut in half," a woman in the crowd told him. He shot back, "The same could be said for you!"

The story of American documentary filmmaking is often told from the perspective of the 60s verité movement. But, with his first film, Errol Morris was going against the grain and provoking a discussion.

Armed with untethered 16mm film cameras in the early 1960s, a group of American filmmakers redefined documentary. Robert Drew, The Maysles Brothers, DA Pennebaker and others pioneered an observational direct cinema movement in American documentary filmmaking. Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven offered an approach that was far from verité.

Told through interviews with subjects looking right into the camera, Gates of Heaven is the unexpected story of pet cemeteries and the people behind them. Consisting entirely of interviews and lacking narration, the film offers a unique portrait of an unseen segment of society even as it reaches broader topics about life and death.

Defining himself as "a kind of contrarian at heart," Morris said that he sought to counter all the tenets of verité filmmaking. His camera was static, his set-ups were well lit, and he had his subjects looking directly into the camera. There could be no doubt that his documentary was crafted differently.

To hear Errol Morris tell it, however, audiences didn't know what to make of Gates of Heaven.

Born in New York in the late 40s, Errol Morris studied at Princeton before moving to Berkeley to focus on philosphy. While in the Bay Area, he programmed films at San Francisco's Pacific Film Archive. Douglas Sirk was among his favorites filmmakers at the time and was a filmmaker he screened at the venue. Being a fan of Sirk, Morris recalled last week, he was clearly excited when Gates of Heaven was invited to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival in the same year that Sirk would be in attendance.

To Morris's surprise, Sirk was puzzled by Gates of Heaven.

"You know, that's not a movie," Douglas Sirk told Errol Morris about Gates of Heaven, "That's a slideshow." Continuing, Sirk added in his comments to Morris, "You know it's possible that some people may look at [Gates of Heaven] ironically."

The anecdote drew hearty laughs from the Lincoln Center audience, but Errol Morris said that he realizes the movie subverts the expectations of documentary viewers.

"It's such a strange and primitive film," Morris admitted of Gates of Heaven, "It's almost an anti-film film."

Morris followed up Gates of Heaven with the acclaimed Vernon, Fl, which debuted at the 1981 New York Film Festival, after which he was unable to get funding for another movie for quite some time. He worked as a private detective in New York for a bit to make money and eventually found his way back to filmmaking with the acclaimed The Thin Blue Line in 1988.

Despite his success in carving out new approaches to non-fiction filmmaking, the desire for a clearer documentary style continues to stalk Morris. After last week's screening of Gates of Heaven he was asked what the film is about.

"I don't know what it's about," he shot back, "Is that part of my job description?"

This special event was part of Film Society of Lincoln Center's ongoing series 50 Years of the New York Film Festival, a year-by-year survey of NYFF's history leading up to its 50th edition this fall. Watch full video of the Q&A below and make sure to check out other films in the series.

This Saturday, Film Comment Selects presents critic J. Hoberman in person for a special performance titled Land Passion War of the Dead Christ Worlds.

In the upcoming issue of Film Comment, Hoberman writes about Joe Dante and Jon Davison's Movie Orgy, a touring series of screenings where two simultaneously running projectors would “interpolate reedited TV shows, hygiene films, and newsreels.” Ken Jacobs also pioneered the use of multiple projections in his 24-hour long screening/performance A Good Night at the Movies. Hoberman, a former student and projectionist of Jacobs, was in the audience for A Good Night at the Movies 2, and later incorporated this technique into his own classes. Film Comment spoke with Hoberman and Jacobs recently about the movi-verse, double projecting, and more.

What was the original impetus for “A Good Night at the Movies?” Where did you come up with the idea of double and triple projecting?

Ken Jacobs: That came after. First, there was this idea of just throwing films out into space. “We're here... [knocks on table] Hello?” It's pathetic to be honest. So I didn't have any support for that. People thought it was crazy. I'd been doing multiple projections for years. It was the way Eisenstein talks about things happening between shots––let's see what happens with things between movies. Because I went further afterwards, what happens between the eyes, by working with 3D and 3D shadowplay. One actually opens up a space between the eyes, where you can make very uncanny things happen. You can really misinform the audience. Not that the audience is “informed”.

When did you start doing them?

KJ: In the 50s. Just for fun.

In those first screenings, and maybe it changed over time, how did you  decide what to show?

KJ: All these films were meaningful to me in a certain way. I remember concentrating on titles and movies that featured guys with pith helmets, explorers…all this B.S. about the white man going out there and conquering. I have been rather critical of America since I was 17 years old, with the same thoughts and observations. It's all racism. You know, as Jew, with relatives in Europe, that my grandmother was in touch with before the war and much less afterwards, I was made very aware of what this racism could do.

So was it only colonialist fare? When did you start introducing other things?

KJ: There's this terrible self-hating black film called God's Stepchildren. The audience was mostly my students, and they had originally heard me rail about these things and point them out. I really wasn't inviting the public in. I mean, I literally wasn't. Art Spiegelman made this sign on the door. I said, “Very nice, Art!”

J. Hoberman: But Ken, I don't remember doing multiple projections at Binghamton, or at least when I was there projecting for you. I remember because I was the projectionist for a while.

KJ: Yes, that's true.

JH: So I remember it was mainly stuff with the analytical projector, over and over, creeping through these movies––The Bicycle Thief, Touch of Evil, They Live By Night...

KJ: God, I wish I had taken these classes.

JH: I don't remember seeing multiple projections until “A Good Night for the Movies.”

KJ: Yeah.

JH: It was an analysis course, so it was always looking at the ideas that went into any given shot or scene. But you would get engrossed in certain things purely on a perceptual level and want to see them again. You were just interested by the way that the space developed in a certain shot, and you would want to see them again and again.

KJ: It was just another way of pushing this phenomena. An image is a distillation of a lot of ideas. These guys in the studios did not just make images. They concocted something that was gonna place your mind in a certain place of how to receive an idea in their way. And you wouldn't even know it. The architectonic quality of a shot is unfathomable. When something has really been done, all you can do is take it in a state of awe.

Why did you co-credit “A Good Night at the Movies” with Charles Ives?

KJ: He was a sublime American composer. His father had been a band leader, but a marching band leader. And his father had done things like this, of having different bands playing different music across fields. It would open up the void. And he went on to make music inspired by this. He brought together different songs being played together at the same time, so the space became very important to me. A real thing. The idea of these unexpected juxtapositions.

JH: Yeah. He was taking off on very corny stuff––you know, that old folk and bucket and turning it into this other thing.

KJ: Like shitty movies!

Do you feel there's an ideal space for a concert of films? Different spaces have different sound qualities.

KJ: That's a new thought for me. Just wherever they would let me. Come in, do your damage.

Jim, when did you start doing double projections?

JH: I was inspired by something Ken had said: if you do this, the movies will start talking to each other. That's what I really got from “A Good Night at the Movies”. I was sitting there watching it with my friend Bob Schneider and he said, “Oh my god, we're watching new laws of physics!” We were just beside ourselves watching this go on. It was the incredible synchronicity, and the fact that you could just set this stuff in motion and there would be these fantastic correspondences.

KJ: They had their formulas. The formulas sold, and they weren't going to screw around with them.

JH: Exactly. There was only a certain amount of screening time in a class, so I wanted to be economical. Also I didn't want to show like six hours of these awful movies. If I could show them together, it would only be two hours.

KJ: Heuristics; self-learning. If you put someone in the position––you don't vent at them. They have to see this evidence. They have to see it.

JH: That's right.

KJ: You don't have to lecture. It will make its own point. These movies will talk to each other and you'll get it.

JH: Exactly. I don't remember the first one I did. An early one…well, let me say, I was showing a lot of movies that I wasn't showing for their aesthetic value, but for other reasons. And I remember I had to show Rocky, a movie that I really hated, to make a point for this course. So I got the department to give me three monitors and then I showed Rocky on the big screen, and then beneath it I had three monitors showing the three sequels to Rocky, so there was a lot for people to look at. And what happened was you realized it was amazingly the same film, four times: four fights in exactly the same place. So that was very exhilarating. And the students also appreciated that. It got some notoriety in the department. And then sometimes I would do things just to see how they worked. I've forgotten a lot of them. But a student recently reminded me that I showed E.T., which I was very interested in, because the students at that point would've been about five when they first saw it, and for them it would've been a life-changing, formative event. But I think I was also involved in the American scene, or suburbia or something. So I had slides made from “The Americans” by Robert Frank, and somehow I was projecting those slides on E.T.

KJ: These are creations. You know, he was a filmmaker. And this is still filmmaking.

JH: And then I got lazy.

KJ: Books, books, books. Who can't toss off a book?

JH: I've used Passion of the Christ a lot, Ken, and I think I would want to spare you from that.

KJ: Well, I just bought it. They sell it for five dollars across the street.

JH: I should get a copy for five dollars…I showed it once with Fahrenheit 9/11, which was very interesting. And then more recently with some zombie movies.

So when you projected Passion of the Christ with Fahrenheit 9/11, how did the two interact?

JH: With Fahrenheit 9/11, I realized that there was all this religious imagery that he just worked into the movie. The most amazing thing is the suffering mother. All of a sudden, you have Mary at the cross, and Michael Moore embracing this suffering mother, and these things were happening around the same time. That was really startling.

KJ: Sad. Someone of the left manipulating you, which is the problem with the right. Tells you things maybe you want to hear, but not that way. Doesn't trust you to form your own opinion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is about the interplay between different found footage, too. This of course is related to the idea of video mashups, where two or more videos are edited together to appear as one. Do you see what you were doing with multiple projections as similar to that?

KJ: I haven't seen any of that stuff. But if they play music over it, they're losing everything. You're tampering with the evidence.

Aside from God's Step Children, were there any favorites you had to play?

KJ: “The Green Mamba” with Lionel Atwill...

JH: It’s not actually called the “The Green Mamba,” but he and Flo [Jacobs] are obsessed with this…Lionel Atwill’s always good! Remember in the third and best Frankenstein where Bela Lugosi is Igor and Atwill gets stabbed or something in his wooden arm?

KJ: I can't remember, but Jack would've––

JH: When I was in high school, people didn't really know directors. If you were interested in old movies, what you knew were these character actors. That was like a sign of your knowledge––Lionel Atwill being one of those.

KJ: Jerry Sims knew the names of all these people. I just thought, even into my twenties, they're like filler or something like that in the movies, and then there's the stars. But they understood that it was really the orchestration.

JH: Yeah.

KJ: And they really did some things––Slim Summerville really did something.

JH: And especially because they're the same in everything––they hold the whole thing together.

KJ: The cop is always the cop––you can see his face now! The judge is always the judge. And these people used to be stopped in the streets when people had legal problems.

JH: That's what they do. That's what their purpose is...You had a great course title. I don't know what you did after I was there––I was there only a relatively short time. You had a course title that was something like “Movies Are Not Made in Heaven.”

KJ: Yes. And when you're a kid, they are.

JH: And some people still think so.

KJ: And the idea that stars use a toilet is unbearable.

JH: There's a fascinating thing going on now––whether to attribute the authorship of “It's Half-Time in America” to Clint Eastwood. It's almost Reaganlike in some ways. “Did he write his own dialogue?” As they say in Sunset Boulevard, people think that actors make up their own dialogue, that they're so witty.

KJ: Right.

What are some other films you liked to show?

KJ: Cartoons were very important to me. They're succinct, they're really sweet in many cases. And pointless.

JH: I learned this too late to include in the upcoming Film Comment article, but somebody remembered that you showed “Sunshine Makers”. That used to be a huge cartoon for kids in the Fifties.

Is that in Star Spangled to Death? It seems like the strategy there is sort of similar to what you've described as the goals of your teaching and these screenings. Did any material from either work its way into Star Spangled to Death?

JH: I think Pincushion Man was in that.

I know that Jim had mentioned that you used the CBS piece on the wire monkey test in class a lot.

JH: You used to show that all the time!

KJ: Oh poor you. You know, I'd been living before I was teaching, so this stuff hung on to me. The fact that is the stuff that actually took a lot out of my life. Teaching actually kept stirring up that stuff. And with the completion of Star Spangled, it's like I've said it.

How was Jim as a projectionist?

KJ: Angry. You must admit that.

JH: Resentful? Oh yeah. It was a baptism under fire. Projecting for Andrew Sarris was much easier.

KJ: Oh my god. Oh my god...

Speaking of complex projection setups, The Rocky installation/class sounds great, but you can't always have that.

JH: It was always determined in my case by what was available, by what I could get the authorities to give me. And what could physically be done. The students at NYU would call it “stunt projecting.”

As the technology has changed, how have your double projections changed? Most screening rooms now only have a single digital projector.

JH: It became harder and harder to do these––well, actually, it became different as they got rid of 16mm and moved toward projected video. I remember showing something called Titanic Armageddon. It was a course about disaster movies. I showed Armageddon, and in the middle projected the disaster part of Titanic on top of it in slower motion.

So how do you adapt or change the screening if things aren't going well?

JH: If it works, it never fails to be interesting. But if there's a problem or if I lose a projector and had to make do with monitors or laptops, then I would have to rethink how the presentation. Ideally, it should be big. If it can't be big, I'll do it another way.

Aside from using a favorite for the screening [Passion of the Christ], were there any other aesthetic considerations you made for the screening at Walter Reade?

JH: I asked for a late slot in honor of Jack [Smith]. Of Jack's method of narrowing down the audience to the appreciative few.

KJ: But the trick is to invite them early, and then––

JH: Well, it's whenever you invite them, you spend an hour at least trying to get it to work. When I saw his stuff, it never occurred to me that he could be in the grip of some neurotic behavior pattern. I thought it was all done on purpose.

KJ: You're always looking for faith. Now you realize that artists are fuckups.

JH: And now I realize it's the thing itself, it's not the person. Ken didn't like Andy Warhol.

KJ: But I liked the movies.

JH: Yes. People used to say, “Oh, it's a put on.” And you'd say, “What's the difference? It's interesting. Just look at it.”

For the first time in its 17-year history, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema will include a special sidebar section, Rendez-Vous+, seeking to expand the annual festival’s offerings to documentaries and little-seen early features from now-acclaimed directors.

This diverse 12-program sidebar will include the epic three-part documentary Muslims of France, tracing Muslim lives in France from the early 19th century to contemporary political controversies through archival footage and historian interviews. France’s colonial legacy also informs Here We Drown Algerians, the harrowing story of a brutal French crackdown on an Algerian march in 1961 that went largely unreported until the early 1990s.

Elsewhere in the series is an opportunity to see an early work by A Prophet director Jacques Audiard, See How They Fall (1994), a darkly funny noir powered by intersecting stories. Garde à vue (1981), an early film from Claude Miller (A Secret), concerns a duel between a rough-edged policeman and a prominent local lawyer he arrests for rape on New Year’s Eve. Save your venturesome side for prolific cult director Jean Rollin’s The Shiver of Vampires, about newlyweds who stop at a castle for the night only to realize it’s HQ for a group of lesbian vampires.

Rendez-Vous+ will run concurrently with Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, highlighted this year by Opening Night film The Intouchables, now one of France’s top-grossing movies ever, and a new resorted version of the masterwork Children of Paradise (1945). It’s also stacked with in-person appearances by filmmakers and actors, including Mathieu Amalric, Laurent Achard, François Cluzet, Benoit Jacquot, Tahar Rahim and Audrey Tautou.

Tickets to both series are now on sale to Film Society members & patrons and will go on sale to the general public on February 16. Tickets to Rendez-Vous+ films are only $10, for everyone!

Universal City, 1969. A projection room. The film is former blacklistee Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. The guests include fellow HUAC defier Adrian Scott, and directors Tay Garnett, Allan Dwan, and William A. Wellman. The man behind the screening, then-distributor and freelance publicist Pierre Rissient, seizes this opportunity to speak to Wellman about Polonsky's difficulties with the Hollywood blacklist. Wellman does not react well. Clearly, the mere mention of the word "communist" makes him see red. But after the screening, he rushes to Polonsky, showers him with compliments, urges Dwan and Garnett to join in the praise, and becomes Willie Boy's most enthusiastic supporter. And he goes even further: upon hearing that Universal chief Lew Wasserman doesn't believe in the film, he unhesitatingly calls to bawl him out and, Wasserman being unavailable, leaves an incendiary message with his flabbergasted secretary: "If that asshole motherfucker doesn't realize this is a masterpiece, if that bastard won't defend Willie Boy, tell him..." You can imagine the rest. The next day, he rallied Henry Hathaway and others to his campaign, creating a sensational uproar.

All of Wellman is contained in this contradiction. On the one hand, the militant anticommunist, the right-wing reactionary, full of anger at certain Democratic presidents. On the other hand, the anarchic fighter, the generous individualist who, when he liked someone or something, forgot his prejudices and principles. His son, William Wellman, Jr., in an article in the March-April 1970 issue of the Directors Guild magazine Action, tersely defined him as "the rebel director." Then he wrote what could almost pass for an epitaph:

Consider a man who:

Was a juvenile delinquent;

Played ice-hockey for a living as a kid;

Became a World War One flying ace at eighteen;

Was a lousy actor but a good messenger boy;

Became a film director and was fired from almost every studio in Hollywood;

Had many romantic misses before marrying the wife he has had for 36 years;

Has seven children and eleven grandchildren;

Earned and kept a fortune;

Quit after forty years at the top of his profession.

Let's add a few paradoxes:

1. Wellman's high-profile, groundbreaking films are his most interesting and successful: Public Enemy (31), A Star Is Born (37), The Ox-Bow Incident (43). This isn't the case with other Hollywood directors—think of Ford's The Fugitive or Cukor's Romeo and Juliet.
2. Said ambition is sometimes difficult to pinpoint. The films he produced himself are not among his best, nor are those he wrote (The Robin Hood of El Dorado [36] is, as a matter of fact, devoid of ambition). The sole exception in the latter category is A Star Is Born, whose sobriety counters the excess and over-the-top melodrama usually displayed by Selznick productions. The film even opens with a close-up of the screenplay, a dramatic device that now seems 30 years ahead of its time.
3. Wellman was a former aviator, but his best war films were about the life of the foot soldier.
4. We owe this very macho man some wonderful portraits of women, even some films that are surprisingly feminist in tone: Night Nurse (31), Safe in Hell (31), Westward the Women (51).

French critics in the Fifties and Sixties got it wrong when they heralded Wellman as a progressive, or at least liberal, filmmaker. Certain articles in Cahiers du Cinéma (which expressed surprise that he had made The Iron Curtain [48]) and in the leftist Positif need to be challenged. The Iron Curtain was not a studio-imposed job; on the contrary, it faithfully reflected Wellman’s principles (found again in 1955’s Blood Alley, the French-dubbed version of which spirited away all the anticommunist content)­­—which were closer to John Wayne’s than to those of Ford, who, at the time, was branded by the same magazines as the arch reactionary. These kinds of misconceptions abound, on both ends of the political spectrum, and have stigmatized other directors (e.g., Milestone’s supposed “militarism”). In Wellman’s case, it can be explained by one single word: realism.

Because Wellman made a relatively daring film on the subject of lynching, and a few ambitious and unusually authentic-looking war pictures, he was labeled a realist. The label is justified, provided one knows exactly what it means. The director of Wings (27) belongs to a generation of filmmakers who had become accustomed to being their own masters during the silent era. They often behaved like anarchists and would brook no interference. They had a reactionary bent, but that didn't keep them from challenging taboos and restrictions. The producer, with few exceptions (Selznick seems to have had a creative relationship with Wellman), became the enemy as soon as he attempted to meddle. Wellman sent the producers of Wings to a field without telling them he was about to begin shooting a bombing sequence there; they left him alone for the rest of the project. He is also said to have dumped cartloads of manure in front of a studio mogul's office.

All of these filmmakers—Wellman, Hawks, Ford, Walsh—were creating a new language, and their struggle was an apolitical one. Everything in this battle was of equal value: to shoot on location, to defy the Production Code, to direct a picture about lynching, to be the first to deal with taboo subjects. Aside from his admiration for Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s fine novel, when Wellman took on The Ox-Bow Incident he was equally attracted by the screenplay’s scathing content and by the notion of doing a different kind of Western­—one without women and whose violence worried executives at Fox.

A movie without women—almost. Two minor female characters are of capital importance: the unforgettable and awesome Jane Darwell, barbarism incarnate, and Mary Beth Hughes as Henry Fonda’s former fiancée, whom he meets in a beautiful, uncanny sequence, in the midst of the film’s central chase, after she has married someone else. One could almost say there are three female characters, since in the opening scene a saloon painting of a woman triggers a striking passage of dialogue.

For such directors, the artistic (if one may use a word they disliked) aim was a close mixture of a more-or-less-vague quest for "truth," a determination to avoid clichés, and the pursuit of "entertainment." They fought to shoot certain stories as much in order to break rules and challenge conventions as for their actual content, to introduce technical innovations (the rejection of rear projection and studio-bound exteriors) as much as to escape from routine. Their genius lay in their sometimes unconscious grasp of the fact that everything was linked. The setting up of an outdoor crane shot was as important as a screenplay's daring invention. As a result, many of them expressed a measure of pride in certain aspects of their films that, to us, seems (or used to seem) disproportionate. Wellman discussed at length a tracking shot set in the Folies Bergères (Wings) that was quite innovative, and he seemed to feel that Fonda’s way of reading the letter in Ox-Bow (in an extraordinary setup that hides his eyes behind the brim of his hat) was as important as the meaning of the sequence.

While critics noticed innovations in Wellman’s films more often than in those of other directors of his generation, they neglected some of his most original ideas in favor of flashier ones. The linguistic authenticity attempted in Across the Wide Missouri (51) was ignored, even though few Westerns had done anything like it at the time—the Blackfoot Indians spoke Blackfoot, the French spoke French (in the French-dubbed version, they even used a Bearn patios to distinguish between them).

Wellman's vigor is reflected in his often biting comedies and his tough, rugged action films and dramas. He attempted to instill them with the virility he boasted in real life, even directing love scenes while wielding a "suggestive" piece of wood. He also relied on literary sources that were not widely known. As a result, Wellman seemed more of an auteur, a man who brought his own vision of the world to his films. But confusing the use of realism with political commitment has been the source of many a critical blunder. Even George Bernard Shaw, in a famous analysis pitting Shakespeare against Ibsen, sides with the latter "because he is a realist." Realism is merely a method, not an end. For Wellman, it was an opportunity to more accurately and credibly depict the behavior of people he knew (soldiers, cowboys, flyers), not to analyze or criticize them. Thanks to his talent, the films sometimes go beyond their premises, and even contradict them. Again to paraphrase, Shaw said that he was depressed by how many people saw life realistically and expressed themselves romantically. Let’s apply this remark to American cinema. There is a whole category of directors (Dwan, King) who see life romantically and express it similarly. Others (Walsh, Torneur, Preminger in the Fifties) express it realistically. As for Wellman, he straddles both approaches; he is a half-romantic who films half-realistically. This may be why critics used to single him out. His ambition is immediately visible, as it lies in understating and pruning.

Many of Wellman’s screenplays are characterized by a kind of punctilious, down-to-earth verism that helps de-dramatize the subject's main thrust, while the direction goes counter to the initial point of departure. Not in the most obvious respects (choice of location, direction of actors) but in the internal dynamics. Thus there is a strange contradiction between the de-dramatized tone of some sequences in Yellow Sky (49) or 'The Story of G.I. Joe (45), and a mise-en-scène that often relies on studied, even aestheticized setups. In some of his films, the direction seldom coincides with what it is supposed to express. It remains mostly parallel to the subject. Wellman's vaunted spareness and sobriety seem curiously sidetracked by the visual style, or even the internal relationships between shots. In this respect, Yellow Sky, revisited, is a disappointment. The conventional script (according to Todd McCarthy, based on The Tempest) impedes the dramatic progression by visually emphasizing gestures that shouldn't have been underscored. It's like dismantling an engine to showcase its smallest and most expendable parts.

As a result of this lack of an overall vision, the notion of hero, or protagonist, is undermined—a rare occurrence in American cinema. But Wellman's rejection of individualism is not always counterbalanced by depictions of community, except in the most conventional sense, as in Island in the Sky (53), The High and the Mighty(54), Call of the Wild (36), Robin Hood of El Dorado, the very disappointing Beau Geste (39), or even much of Wings. This is a far cry from Ford’s exaltation of community or Hawks’s self-contained groups of professionals. Wellman underplays what many have seemed to clichéd in Hollywood cinema (the romantic hero, overdramatized action), but this spareness reveals, in his bad films, an equally conventional worldview. Hence the strange impression created by a film like Buffalo Bill (44): what was taken as a critical intention was actually a side effect of Wellman's style, and resulted in a kind of overall dullness from which no real content arose. Clichés are toned down or eschewed, but nothing takes their place. As a result, Wellman seemed more "artistic" and ambitious than Dwan or Henry King.

Wellman's approach is particularly fruitful in his war pictures. The at-times tedious austerity of G.I. Joe or Battleground (49) paradoxically makes them fascinating, as the disintegration of dramatic structure, added to the down-to-earth, realistic tone, gives these narratives the flavor of distanced reporting. Wellman's soldiers march, eat, pee, dig holes, march again, dig holes again, and never understand what's going on. Since no one stands out as a hero (not even Mitchum, although excellent in G.I. Joe), the dominant impression is akin to the vision of the Battle of Waterloo by the uncomprehending protagonist in Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. Wellman's intention was to show "daily heroism" in the tradition of British cinema, but his direction ended up canceling out heroism altogether. In Battleground, there are sublime sequences thoroughly devoid of excitement; even the gags generate no feeling of euphoria. When confronted with the highly original qualities of such films as Battleground, Westward the Women, Track of the Cat (54), G.I. Joe, or Across the Wide Missouri, one gets the feeling that Wellman, as Manny Farber brilliantly put it, wants to tell stories about men “standing around—for no damned reason and with no indication of for how long.”

Such a definition, which could apply to some of his Paramount films of the Thirties (for example, 1930's disastrous Dangerous Paradise), is thoroughly contradicted by most of his Warner-produced pictures of 1931-33 that I have been able to see. They include several daring, brilliant masterpieces in which Wellman's best qualities blossom. Some are justly famous, like The Public Enemy, in which Cagney's superb performance is just as modern as the dialogue by Harvey Thew. Others, such as The Hatchet Man (32), are based on delirious premises, but brilliant direction (at the beginning, a funeral procession turns into a panicked stampede filmed in a series of breathtaking crane shots interspersed with close ups of painted dragons and histrionic exchanges) transcends the mind-boggling plot twists and questionable casting. The closing sequence is staggering: Edward G. Robinson throws a hatchet through a painting to prove he is the Chinatown executioner. The blade pins the bad guy to the wall. For a while we think he's still alive, because his body and head move, but the movement is due to the fact that the hatchet is being pulled out of the wall.

Wellman's social-problem films are among the genre's most radical and violent. Hal Wallis had several shots deleted from Wild Boys of the Road (33) because he deemed them unbearable for the general public; to Wellman they expressed the realities of the Depression. The scenes of gangs of children running after the trains are both spectacular and poignant, and superior to Nikolai Ekk’s 1931 film Road to Life, Wellman’s original inspiration. The word “communism” is even uttered—most daringly. Of course, in Heroes for Sale (33), the Marxist character is co-opted by the System, and Richard Barthelmess tries to prevent the striking workers from rioting. But in addition to brutal repression Wellman shows police-like militias chasing the Reds, and he does it in a critical fashion. It is one of the few films, to my knowledge, that alludes to the existence of communists. The ending is thoroughly uncompromising: the victims of the Depression are still on the road, begging in the rain.

Night Nurse and Safe in Hell are also remarkable films, among the major successes of the Pre-Code period. They give us detailed portraits of the world of labor, and they tackle any number of topics that would soon become taboo. In Night Nurse, a splendid, very sexy Barbara Stanwyck, often seen wearing nothing but her slip, confronts a wealthy, grimacing doctor (probably a cocaine fiend) who, aided by his diabolical right-hand man (a black-clad Clark Gable), tries to starve two children to death in order to seize their trust fund. There is an abundance of provocative lines ("I'm a dypsomaniac, and I like it") and exchanges ("Why can't my son have a screen round his bed?"—"It's against the rules."—"What about this one?"-"He is dying, madam"). No cop or judge comes along to reestablish Law and Order. Stanwyck protects a wounded bootlegger who will "take care" of the bad guy at the end, although in a nonchalant, elliptical manner. One line suggests what may have happened to Clark Gable and is confirmed by the closing exchange, worthy of Rowland Brown: “The guy inside was taken for a ride.”—“The Bootlegger?”—“No, he was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform.”

In the even stranger Safe in Hell, a crime melodrama gradually turns into a wry, sarcastic fable. The heroine, clearly a prostitute, believes (mistakenly) that she has killed a man and is wanted for murder (the opening sequences are stunning, their openness and pace still amazing today). She seeks refuge on a Caribbean island from which criminals cannot be extradited. There she must deal with a collection of characters who represent, more or less, the most depraved aspects of civilization. The film at times brings to mind Jean Genet's The Balcony. In Pre-Code Hollywood, Thomas Doherty writes that Sinclair Lewis felt that the cabaret singer played by Clarence Muse was one of only two exceptions to the demeaning portrayal of blacks in Hollywood films (the other being Clarence Brown's doctor in Arrowsmith).

In Other Men's Women (31), another great achievement with remarkable energy and vitality, real locations and elements of every day life are integrated with the plot twists without regard for rules and conventions, making it closer to Renoir than to Lloyd Bacon or Ray Enright. The opening sequence, a bantering exchange between a railroad engineer and his girlfriend in a depot cafe, is paced to the passing of a real train, the man counting the cars as he sweet-talks the girl and drinks his coffee before jumping aboard the last one. Even more impressive, an argument on the railroad tracks between the engineer and his other girl is filmed in one continuous shot. When the girl walks away, Wellman keeps the man framed as he calls after her louder and louder, and she answers off-screen. Cagney, once again, is outstanding.

Toward the end of his career, Wellman returned, less efficiently, to a relaxed, laid-back tone, at least in his war films. In quick succession, he directed two exhilarating, rambunctious movies using young TV actors under Warner's contract: Darby's Rangers (58) and Lafayette Escadrille (58). In the third shot of Darby's Rangers, two guys bump into each other as they look at a recruiting poster. This is the prelude to a series of gags and comical adventures climaxing with a bawdy scene in which Etchika Choureau is hosed down by soldiers in charge of wartime delousing. A number of scenes between Choureau and James Garner involve a bed whose springs are constantly checked and rechecked. Although uneven, the film ends in a fine, fog-bound battle sequence, with a superb lateral tracking shot that ends on a group of Germans lying ready in ambush.

Lafayette Escadrille is even more lighthearted. Ostensibly paying tribute to the American flyers killed in France during WWI, the film actually deals with a gang of pranksters more interested in picking up girls. They must endure French officers who deliver rapid-fire instructions on how to handle the planes, although the Americans don't understand a word of French. They botch everything, drive Marcel Dalio crazy, play the banjo during inspection, nail the sentries to their sentry boxes. One shot suggests the tone of the entire film: when it's announced that the U.S. has entered the war, a young soldier jumps up enthusiastically—and hits his head on the ceiling. Wellman sneaks in two extraordinary shots. Tab Hunter, an actor Wellman was understandably reluctant to use, escapes from a French prison and is seen running in the distance under a stunning stormy sky. Filmed in silhouette against the horizon, he knocks out a sentry and steals his uniform. Earlier, Hunter has met Choureau. A group of soldiers are chatting near a bar. The camera frames the girl's face while everybody around her is talking; Wellman holds the shot for a long time. She simply looks at the camera, while people talk, laugh, walk past. This daring, modern approach leaves you speechless. Such moments make up for the flaws (including the ending, disowned by Wellman) of a ramshackle but very youthful, high-spirited movie.

One might think, then, that Wellman feels most comfortable when he lets himself go, as is the case with many American directors. The truth is more complex. A comedy like Magic Town (47), written by Robert Riskin, is thoroughly anonymous, with only one delightful scene—James Stewart and Jane Wyman competing in a poetry recitation contest (he reads The Charge of the Light Brigade, she Hiawatha). On the other hand, such ambitious, dramatic projects as Westward the Women (from a subject by Frank Capra) and Track of the Cat are outstanding.

We shouldn't forget the excellent Across the Wide Missouri, a film that was reportedly as badly butchered as Huston's Red Badge of Courage, which accounts for several continuity mistakes and some weird ellipses. Despite these flaws, and an obnoxious dubbed-on commentary, the film has a relaxed, meandering narrative style that equals Hawks's in The Big Sky. Wellman, much more at ease with Indians than Hawks had been, depicts them with sly humor: the appearance of the chief clad in a suit of armor is one of the richest moments in Westerns, and Gable's wedding night with his Native American bride makes up for many a racist movie. Wellman reacts with spontaneous generosity to racial minorities—he is closer to Ford in that respect. In his evocation of pioneer life, he yields to a Rousseau-esque romanticism seldom seen in his earlier works, and not devoid of dignity. Even the film's cruel Indian (played by Ricardo Montalban) is presented with simplicity and without any striving for effect. It's actually not him, but a white trapper, who starts the battle in which the Montalban character kills an Indian chief, and his death—he's stabbed with a rifle's bayonet—is one of the most beautiful shots in any Wellman film. After this violent outburst, the movie settles into a melancholy serenity: "Fallen trees rot on the ground; men are buried where they died," the commentary says, and we can be sure this is the kind of death Wellman yearned for.

This gentle touch would not be found again in a Wellman film, except in the little-known Good-bye, My Lady (56), a nice piece of Americana, as Films in Review might have put it. This modest coming-of-age drama takes place in the Mississippi bayou and deals with a double education: that of a dog called Lady, and of her owner, a young boy (Brandon De Wilde) who is being brought up by his uncle (Walter Brennan) with the help of a black man (Sidney Poitier). This sort of thing had little chance of pleasing the critical intelligentsia, which looks down on family dramas, even though many directors have made masterpieces within the genre. The film is not flawless—a few sequences involving the dog and various minor characters are rather nondescript. But several scenes between De Wilde and Brennan (who is fantastic-watch how he keeps inventing new ways of walking) are extremely powerful. I particularly love the moment in which the boy reads to his uncle as he gradually falls asleep. The accomplished, highly risky ending has a quality worthy of Capra or McCarey.

Track of the Cat remains a truly bizarre movie. The narrative thread is reminiscent of Yellow Sky (but with more of a Dreyer touch) or the outlandishness of Ford's 7 Women. Writer A.I. Bezzerides's reservations are understandable: out of enthusiasm, Wellman allegedly shot the first draft of the screenplay without waiting for rewrites. The dialogue is verbose and heavy-handed at times, while at others one wishes some elements were more developed. A little more action and drama wouldn't have hurt the subject's ambitions (slaughtered Indians are supposedly reincarnated as a mountain lion).

Wellman's refusal to show the cougar, even as a mere shadow, is unduly dogmatic, and fails where Tourneur so elegantly succeeded in Cat People. The director acknowledged his mistake but added that he would have had to show the cat devouring Mitchum—not an easy task. The option he chose, however, weakens the construction (he didn't show the dead animal): the scene where Tab Hunter kills the cougar looks more like an editing trick to mask a filming error than an aesthetic choice, and thus loses much of its power. The repetitive shots of the mountain, instead of enhancing the atmosphere, end up calling attention to the lack of variety in the choice of locations.

As often happens with Wellman, however, the flaws have a way of turning into virtues—or at least the distinction between the two becomes fluid. The static talkiness of the beginning (Lee Server in his Mitchum biography calls it “summer stock O’Neill”) becomes fascinating and truly daring at times. At any rate, Wellman happily tramples on all the rules of Hollywood narrative—identification, emphasis on action, rapport between the audience and the main character. The result is not necessarily successful, but the toughness of the endeavor and the director's obvious personal commitment are admirable and enthralling. The family Wellman and Bezzerides present us with is evil in an everyday, nontragic way. They are mean and petty, full of envy, frightening Puritanism, jealousy, possessiveness, machismo. The mother is atrocious in her very banality. The father's alcoholism is neither picturesque nor joyful but pathetic. As for the Tab Hunter character, he is a terribly passive hero (a trait worsened by the actor, who is wretchedly directed here).

There are astonishing lines of dialogue, such as the father's comparison of women to clothespins ("All my life, I've lived with a clothespin") or when Mitchum, admirably rigorous and never trying to tone down his character’s harshness, reads and then burns a volume of Keats’s poems. The film is extraordinarily formalist, and not only in its sparse use of color. The narrative gains power from the stark yet self-conscious severity of the setups, which also makes the studio shots more palatable. All the shots around the coffin during the wake (here, again, Wellman, who always favors subtracting, conceals the body) are quite amazing and make up for the heavy-handed repetitions, such as the fumbling for bottles of booze.

I hope the above makes you want to see more Wellman films. I do, and that's all that counts, for one must write primarily for oneself. This article has helped me realize how limited my knowledge of Wellman was. One must have the courage to reexamine one's memories and not feel sorry for oneself. I suspect Wellman never did. His rebellion may have been confused, romantic, sometimes ineffectual. Yet it was necessary and, with all the limitations I have tried to delineate, useful. Incidentally, it was also magnificent.

This article was translated by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, revised from an earlier piece that appeared in Positif.

It’s one of the most indelible sequences in the movies, a few fleeting images of a spaceship crudely smashing into the moon’s eye. And yet its most spectacular incarnation has waited more than 100 years since A Trip the Moon’s original release in 1902 to reach us.

Georges Méliès’ short classic always existed in both black-and-white and hand-colored versions, but it was long believed that, like a depressing amount of Méliès’ work, the color reels were lost with the decline of his production house. A color print was finally discovered in 1993 in Barcelona, but it was badly decomposed, and soon after a long restoration effort was born.

The wait finally ended last year with a splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, with a fully restored color presentation of the film and a tripped-out new soundtrack by the French band Air—who also worked on the soundtracks of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation—that A.O. Scott of The New York Times called "a cinematic highlight of the year, maybe the century.” After a presentation at the New York Film Festival, the Film Society will bring this once-in-a-generation restoration to the Film Center Amphitheater for a one-week run beginning on Friday.

Priced at special low rates—starting at just $7 for members (become a member)—the new version of A Trip to the Moon will screen with The Extraordinary Voyage, a documentary chronicle of the long effort to resort the print. Stretching from Barcelona to Los Angeles, the film reconstructs the painstaking process of bringing the color print back to life, include a nearly decade-long wait for new technology to be invented.

The run starting this weekend coincides with the album release of Air’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune, a complete new soundtrack of tracks from and inspired by the new version of the film. Filter called the album “as thrilling and replete with the unexpected as one might imagine a trip outside the Earth's atmosphere would be.”

Watch a clip from the restored film below, and head here to buy tickets to our limited engagement!

From February 10 – 14, Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates Raquel Welch’s career with a special retrospective featuring classic roles that catapulted her to stardom and made her a cultural icon of the 60s and 70s.

Easily one of the most recognizable faces of the 1960s, Raquel Welch made her big break with the critically acclaimed sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage, which will screen February 10 at 1:45pm and February 12 at 12pm. Following Voyage came One Million Years B.C., where Welch’s charismatic presence—along with an iconic poster featuring her posed in a doeskin bikini—cemented her stardom. Fans of Raquel and One Billion Years B.C. should not miss this opportunity to see the film on the big screen, as well as an in person appearance by Welch on Saturday, February 11 at 9:30pm. Other highlights of the retrospective include 100 Rifles, an energectic Western with Jim Brown and Burt Reynolds, and The Wild Party, an homage to Silent Hollywood era films directed by James Ivory.

Raquel Welch will be in attendance for many of the screenings, offering a rare chance to hear about the production of her films straight from the source! She will be taking questions from author, fashion commentator and renowned Barneys window-dresser Simon Doonan preceding the February 10 screening of the controversial cult classic Myra Breckinridge. Legendary talk show host and New York Times pundit Dick Cavett will moderate a Q&A at the February 11 screening of The Three Musketeers, for which Welch won a Golden Globe. Further conversations with Welch will accompany Kansas City Bomber, Hannie Caulder, and The Last of Sheila.

Accompanying the series will be a photo exhibit at the Furman Gallery featuring images from Welch's private collection including professional set photos from Myra Breckinridge, The Three Musketeers and The Wild Party. 

The 10-film retrospective—Cinematic Goddess: American Sex Symbol, The Films of Raquel Welch—starts Friday and runs for five days. Tickets are on sale now and start at just $8 for members (become a member)!

Images courtesy of THE KOBAL COLLECTION.

This Tuesday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is proud to have Academy Award winning filmmaker Errol Morris on hand for a Q&A following a screening of his debut documentary, Gates of Heaven. The film, which Roger Ebert calls one of the 10 best movies of all time, had its world premiere at the 16th New York Film Festival in 1978.

On the surface, the documentary follows the struggles of two pet cemetaries and the lengths that pet owners go for their closest friends. Of course, this film offers so much more than just that, though. In ways only Morris can pull off, the film is a unique exploration of the quirks of American culture, as well as life and what lies beyond. The film helped launch Morris's career, which includes an Oscar win for his 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. His 1988 film The Thin Blue Line was so well-received that it caused a bit of controversy when it wasn't nominated for the Academy Award. His signature style of unnarrated, interview-only documentaries have helped him become one of the most respected filmmakers working today. If you haven't seen his films—and trust us when we say you owe it to yourself to do so—you've surely seen at least one of his commercials, including work with Apple, Nike, Adidas, and many more. His debut film never received wide distribution, so don't miss your chance to see Morris's first picture on the big screen at one of the places where his career began.

Our series "50 Years of the New York Film Festival" continues Saturday, February 18 with a screening of Carroll Ballard's adaptation of the classic children's book The Black Stallion, which screened at NYFF '79. This family matinee features a special $6 ticket price for kids!

Below is a full list of all the films that played alongside Gates of Heaven at the NYFF in 1978:
A Wedding
Robert Altman, USA, 1978.

Spies (Spione)
Fritz Lang, Germany, 1928.

Skip Tracer
Zale R. Dalen, Canada, 1977.
Shown with Bruce & His Things, Mike Haller, USA.

The Green Room (La chambre verte)
François Truffaut, France, 1968.
Shown with Going Out Of Business, Christopher Gamboni, USA.

Camouflage (Barwy ochronne)
Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland, 1977.
Shown with Discipline Of De, Gus Vant Sant, USA.

Bloodbrothers
Robert Mulligan, USA,1978.

They Are Their Own Gifts
Lucille Rhodes and Margaret Murphy, USA, 1978.

CIA: Case Officer
Saul Landau, USA,1978.

Babies And Banners:  Story Of The Women’s Emergency Brigade
Lorraine Gray, USA, 1978.

Newsfront
Phillip Noyce, Australia, 1978.

The Apple Game (Hra o jablko)
Vĕra Chytilová, Czechoslavakia, 1976.
Shown with Eggs, Ruth C. Hayes, USA.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Preparez vos mouchoirs)
Bertrand Blier, France/ Belgium, 1978.

The Left-Handed Woman (Die linkshändige frau)
Peter Handke, West Germany, 1978.

Dossier 51
Michel Deville, France/West Germany, 1978.
Shown with Duane Michals (1939-1997), Ed Howard, Theodore Haimes, USA.

Despair
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany/France, 1978.

Like A Turtle On Its Back (La tortue sur de los)
Luc Béraud and Hubert Niogret, France/USA.

Gate Of Heaven
Errol Morris, USA, 1978.
Shown with Manimals, Robin Lehman, USA.
Also, The Dogs, Aviva Slesin, USA.

Elective Affinities (Le affinità elettive)
Gianni Amico, Italy, 1978.

The Shout
Jerzy Skolimowski, Great Britain, 1978.
Shown with Valse Triste, Bruce Conner, USA.
Also Sea Travels, Anita Thacher, USA.

Perceval (Perceval le gallois)
Eric Rohmer, France, 1978.

American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince
Martin Scorsese, USA.
Shown with Movies Are My Life: A Profile of Martin Scorsese, Peter Hayden, Great Britain.

The Miracle Of The Wolves (Le miracle des loups)
Raymond Bernard, France, 1924.

Violette (Violette nozière)
Claude Chabrol, France/Canada, 1978.

Fans of French cinema will want to clear their schedules for early March because the 17th Annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema line-up has just been announced! Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance Films are teaming up once again to bring dozens of new films from France to New York, along with Q&As, appearances, and restored masterpieces.

The festivities kick off March 1 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with the New York premiere of The Intouchables, the record-smashing hit that has been impressing French critics and audiences for some time. Directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano and star François Cluzet will be in attendance on opening night.

Some highlights from this year’s celebration include Farewell, My Queen, the Opening Night Film of the 2012 Berlin Film; Audrey Tautou’s newest film, Delicacy, with Tautou in person; and a restoration of the 1945 classic Children of Paradise. Children will love The Painting and Zarafa, two fun adventures featuring beautiful animation.

Sister directors Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin will be on hand to show their debut film, 17 Girls, based on a news story about a pregnancy pact between a group of young girls. Mathieu Demy will show Americano, the new film that he wrote, directed, and starred in opposite Salma Hayek. Fans of our Scary Movies series will want to check out Last Screening, which weaves together horror and cinephilia through the story of an old moview theater with some dark secrets. If it scares you too much, you can take it up with director Laurent Achard, who will be in attendance along with his producer and the film's star.

Rendez-Vous With French Cinema runs from March 1 – 11. For a full list of films showing at the festival, check out the press release.

Instead of a golden watch, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is giving Béla Tarr a complete retrospective for his retirement, along with a theatrical run of his magisterial final film, The Turin Horse. The bleak (and bleakly funny) maestro of modernist black-and-white ruin, Tarr turned the post-communist landscapes of Hungary into elemental playgrounds of loneliness and decay. His films are populated by smoke, fog, and rain as much as the weathered faces of his brooding, binge-drinking protagonists. Tarr spoke with Film Comment about his career before the retrospective begins this weekend.

Could you talk about joining the Béla Belázs studio, and how that led to the making of Family Nest (79)?

It was really simple. I just wanted to do a movie, and it was one place I could go without a diploma. They said, OK, you can try, and they gave me a little bit of money. I shot it in five days, and it cost $10,000 or something like that.

The actors are all nonprofessionals, working-class folks in Hungary. How did you cast them?

I knew them from before I started the movie. I was close to these kinds of people. I was working in a ship factory, and was always close to the ugly, miserable proletarians. I just wanted to show their day-to-day routines, their striving for a better life. I worked in a factory from 1973 to 1976, when I hurt my back, and couldn’t do physical work anymore.

What made you interested in making films, coming from that background?

I loved the cinema always, and I loved to go watch movies. But what I saw there was just stupid lies and fake stories. I never saw life and I never saw anything about the people I knew. I never saw real passion, I never saw real emotions, or real camerawork. I never saw a real movie. I thought, if they cannot show me, then I have to do my movie.

Were you seeing Hollywood films or local ones?

Everything everywhere is the same. The whole fucking storytelling thing is everywhere the same. That’s why I decided I have to do my movies.

When you did The Outsider (81), how did you find lead actor András Szabó? He has a wonderful face.

He was just a musician. He never acted in any movies. You have to understand that it doesn’t matter if I’m working with a big film star, or someone from the next factory. I’m looking for their personality, how they react… And when I choose them, I’m searching for how they are, like real human beings. When I get into real human situations in a scene, I want them to react how they would in their lives. They have to be natural, they have to be dancers. If someone is acting in my movies, I become mad and I stop them and say, “OK, this is nice, what you’re doing, but not in this movie. I’m interested in what is happening inside of you.”

Szabó embodies that approach, with a very quiet, expressive “being” rather than an act. Where did you meet him?

I was watching one of his concerts and afterward I asked him.

How did you work with Ágnes Hranitzky on The Outsider and other films? She is listed as editor and co-author.

It’s quite simple. I set most things up, in terms of the location and the set. Since the beginning, I prefer that she is there because everything happens once you get to the location, and she has a very sharp eye. She can always see if something is wrong. It’s more helpful to watch a film with four eyes, not only with two.

On Prefab People (82), why did you decide to cast real actors?

Prefab People was the first movie in which I worked with professional actors, and that was the first moment when I moved away from the social aspect toward capturing human connections, of the couple. They were a real couple. I wanted to work with them because I love them, and love watching their personalities.

Talk about the transition from the social realist style of your earlier films to the greater artifice of Macbeth (82).

I don’t like this term “social realism.” If you create a movie, you create a fiction. It’s something that looks real, but of course it’s not real because it’s created. For me, they are not political movies. The real art is to show real human conditions and relations, and that’s all I try to do.

What attracted you to Macbeth?

When I went to film school, my professor said I had to do a kind of examination, and shoot something not in my style, something that’s classical. I was thinking, OK, I can do Macbeth. He was very surprised. But anyway, I did it, and really loved to do it. I loved to do it because my same mania came up. What is the relation between the man and the woman? What is happening within them? We cut out about half of the drama, because I was only focusing on these two people. What are their interests, what is their sexuality? A lot of things came up. And of course I did the whole movie in one take. Because it was video and we could do it. I enjoyed it!

What I like about is that in many scenes, you can see the actors’ breath, as if they were already in the cold of a morgue. Where did you shoot it?

By the end we got the support of TV, and got professional quality support, and we shot it in a castle in Budapest. There is a very long cellar, and we were shooting there.

How long did you rehearse for the hour-long shot? How many takes?

We rehearsed for a while, and I think we did 10 takes. We could shoot twice a day, because afterward everyone was over [exhausted?]. I think we had eight takes. By the end I chose the best.

Almanac of Fall (84) is another step towards greater artifice after Macbeth. Was it shot in a studio?

It was shot in a real flat, which I used like a studio. We wanted it to look fake, like a cathedral of lies. About each person’s interests and how they betray each other and fight with each other. And how the fucking money and these interests destroy the human condition.

The characters are like zombies circling a void. And this is the first time you worked with Mihály Vig, whose droning scores seem well matched to your films.

He was in a rock ’n’ roll group and made some really beautiful music, so I thought why not, we should try. And you know, he’s a poet, a very clever man.

Next was Damnation (88), your first collaboration with László Krasznahorkai. How did you meet and conceive of this project?

A friend of mine, who is a college professor here, was reading the manuscript of Satantango, Laszlo’s first book, and he called me and said, “Here is a beautiful work for you.” He explained to me that it was Laszlo’s first book, and that I had to read it. I read it, and fell in love immediately. Afterwards I called him, and we sat together, and I don’t know how it happened, but our first discussion was totally OK, and we became friends.

We wanted to make Satantango into a film immediately, but no one let me do it, and I was in really deep shit. I had no chance to work in Hungary because the politicians here really didn’t like Almanac of Fall, saying it was decadent, really ugly and dirty. It was stupid. Anyway, we were thinking of something else to do, and I thought we should do a simple thing. So we wrote what became Damnation, and went to the Hungarian Film Institute, the Hungarian Film Archive, which had a small amount to give, and the lab, and somehow we made this movie. It was really cheap, but we were independent of the state censorship.

Damnation has elements of film noir, from the torch-singing femme fatale to the regular guy getting caught up in a web of criminality. Was American film noir an influence?

No, not at all. If you go to a small Hungarian town, a miner’s town, you don’t need American film noir. You have the real thing.

The central character in Damnation is one of many passive observers in your films (like the Doctor in Satantango). Instead of delivering the package himself, which he would do in a traditional crime film, he simple passes the job off and watches from the outside.

You know, it’s a very cheap story. It’s not about the story. I wanted to show more than the story, because all stories are the same. But I really love the people, and I wanted to show you the people.

The landscape seems to become more and more important to you as well.

The landscape is one of the main characters. The landscape has a face. We have to find the right location, like we have to find the right music. That’s why I need the music before shooting, because music is also one of the main characters.

Then came Satantango (94). How were you able to get it made?

Damnation went to the Berlin Film Festival, but in Hungary everybody hated it. The politicians hated it, and they told me very clearly that I could not make movies in Hungary any more. We moved to Berlin, and lived there. When we were there, the wall fell down. Afterward, I went back to Hungary, and started to make Satantango.

How much of the book is in the film? The English translation is finally coming here next month.

We kept the structure of the book. Like the tango, it’s six steps forward, six steps back. We kept the chapters, and we kept a lot of things. It is not a direct adaptation, because literature is one language, and film is another. There is no direct way between the two things.

But do you think your use of long tracking shots is a way to translate Laszlo’s winding sentences into film?

The takes get longer and longer to go along with my thinking. I don’t know how my takes are getting longer and longer. It was good meeting Laszlo, because his point of view—how he was watching the world and how I was watching the world—it was similar. And that’s why we work together. We never talk about the movie, we never talk about the art, we are always just talking about the life. Of course he is a very good writer, he writes beautiful sentences, and I have to find a way to show them, in the real. When you shoot a movie, you can only shoot the reality, something that definitely exists. You know, the feel of this movie is very concrete.

And you can see that in the actors you use.

They are not actors, they are friends. It was a big mess.

A mess?

Yes. Because everyone was totally crazy about this shoot. It took two years. We could not shoot in the summer, because of the leaves on the trees, and we could not shoot in the winter, because of the snow. We could only shoot early spring or late autumn.

I think Satantango is your funniest film.

All my movies are comedies! Except The Turin Horse.

Agreed. The comedies continued with Werckmeister Harmonies (00), and the casting of the pinched-face Lars Rudolph. Is it true you had no intention of making it until you met Lars?

Yes. I read the book [Melancholy of Resistance] and loved it, but I could not conceive making a movie out of it, because I didn’t think anyone could play the main character, Valuska. Later, I was in Berlin, doing a workshop with young filmmakers. One of them did a casting call for her short movie, and I watched him sitting in the corner. He wasn’t an actor—at this time he was a street musician. I was watching him and I thought he was amazing, that he could be Valuska. Then I called Laszlo and said, I think now we can do the movie, because I found Valuska.

What was it about Lars that made him perfect for the role?

I loved his personality and his presence, which is totally enough for me.

You have said how much you hate stories, but with The Man From London (07) you adapted a very famous storyteller in Georges Simenon.

It’s not an adaptation, I just loved the atmosphere of the novel. I read Simenon’s novel 20 years ago, and I only remember it for the atmosphere, images of a man over 50, who has a very monotonous daily life, with no chance for change. He sits in his cage alone, while the city is sleeping during a dark night. He is a really lonely man. I just wanted to do a movie about the loneliness. Someone over 50 who has no chance. And what happens when he gets that chance, a temptation.

It is one of your more oppressive works, and seems to move even slower than the others. You used a new DP, Fred Kelemen here. What was his input?

Fred was my student in Berlin in the beginning of the Nineties, his first years in film school. Afterward he became a filmmaker, and we made a short video together for Hungarian television called Journey on the Plain. On pre-production for The Man From London, I started thinking he could do it. I called him, and he came. And he did it perfectly. He was always very close to me.

The presence of Tilda Swinton in the film is a bit jarring in the context of your usual performers. How did she get involved?

It was a funny thing. We had everything cast, except for the mother. Ágnes went through actors and agencies, and she found a small photo of Tilda. But her name wasn’t on the picture, just an ID number. And so we were asking, “Who is this woman?” It was an unknown picture of her. And then they told me, and I thought…fuck. So I was calling her and asking her if she wanted to come, and she immediately said yes. I loved to work with her.

Now on to your first non-comedy, The Turin Horse. How did it originate?

When I first met Laszlo, it was 1985. We just started to talk, and became friends. Once he had a lecture in a theater, and in closing he read this Nietzsche anecdote, but he added this question about what happened to the horse.* After this moment, we would always discuss, from time to time, what happened with the horse? We always came back to that question. I decided after The Man From London that it was over, that I was going to close the shop. But I was thinking and talking with Laszlo, this is our debt. We have to answer this question, “What happened with the horse?” We talked about it, and I knew it would be my last movie.

How did you meet Erika Bók, who is the daughter in The Turin Horse and an important part of Satantango and The Man From London as well?

She was a small girl in an orphanage. She really looked like a wild girl. Somehow we domesticated her. She wasn’t able to say hello, because she was incredibly closed. But she had these beautiful eyes and looked like a small rabbit. She was always in the corner, always afraid. She has grown up, and has a special presence, and was an amazing experience working with her.

The character of the neighbor who gives a philosophical rant about the state of the world in The Turin Horse is representative of a lot of holy drunks and fools in your work. Who wrote this particular speech and what affinity to you have for these end-of-the-bar prophets?

It was written by Laszlo. It just came up during the situation of the shooting, but it was written by him. It’s a normal human situation. If you are going to the next bar, and people are waiting for a drink, they are always talking, talking, talking, and then he gets the bottle…

Your films have some of the greatest boozing scenes in history. What do you yourself get out of drinking?

A kind of joy. And of course it is part of human life. We have to show the joy. The quality of the joy comes through much more clearly and the quality of the life.

* What happened with the horse, according to the epigraph to The Turin Horse: “In Turin on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman—Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore?—loses his patience and takes the whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and that puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this time is foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-moustached Nietzsche suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His neighbor takes him home, where he lies still and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm,” and lives for another ten years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters. Of the horse…we know nothing.”

It's a tricky thing to have a “complete” retrospective of a living filmmaker, what with the possibility that they may continue to write, direct or produce films. But at the 49th New York Film Festival, when Béla Tarr sadly announced “I am not a filmmaker anymore,” he made things a lot less complicated and created an opportunity to present his body of work in full. Film Society of Lincoln Center will be doing just that from February 3 — 8.

Hailed as visionary by the likes of Susan Sontag, Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the films of Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr have long resisted the draw of consumer and corporate conventions, opting instead to explore reality with a formal construction of only his own standards. Sometimes lasting seven hours (Satantango), and typically marked by long continuous takes, prodigious tracking shots, sparse dialogue, and deliberate pacing, Tarr’s films have been polarizing audiences and critics since he made his debut at the age of 22, back in 1970. “Filmmaking is a kind of reaction to the world,” Tarr told Hammer to Nail. “You’re just telling people how you see the world, from your point of view of course.”

Leading up to the U.S. Theatrical Premiere of his latest, and last, film The Turin Horse, FIlm Society will screen all nine of Tarr’s other feature films, including his 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth. His early work consists of piercing, social-realist dramas focused on the desperate lives of the proletariat class (Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Autumn). In the early 1990s, Tarr then achieved auteur superstardom with his series of black-and-white, Communist-era allegories made in close partnership with novelist László Krasznahorkai (Damnation, Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies). Each of the later films (The Man From London, The Turin Horse) is marked by Tarr’s celebrated use of long, elaborately choreographed tracking shots in which camera and actors seem locked in a hypnotic dance—ravishing cinema that demands to be seen on the big screen.

"The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr" opens Friday and runs through February 8. Tickets start at $8 for members for most films, and a four-film package starts at just $28 for members!

The 12^th edition of Film Comment Selects comes to the second half of the year’s shortest month! Sure to delight obsessive repertory film fiends and civilians alike, this 31-strong lineup boasts documentaries, festival rarities, good old-fashioned horror flicks, and one helluva triple-projection by J. Hoberman.

But where to begin? You could always stay on the safe side and catch stuff made by some established directors, perhaps part of the mini Jean-Pierre Gorin retrospective: Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasure, and My Crasy Life. We also have new films from Kore-Eda (I Wish/Kiseki), Sokurov (Faust), and Akerman (Almayer’s Folly/La folie Almayer). Or perhaps you’d like to pair your daring auteur with a recognizable actor, like Fassbinder’s first English-language melodrama Despair, written by Tom Stoppard? (With the premiere of James Franco and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private River, you’ve got a two-in-one.) We’ve also got memorial tributes to Bingham Ray with a screening of Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet, and to Ken Russell with the enfant terrible’s own 1980 fantasia Altered States.

For the more daring, there’s a swath of new releases from around the world, snatched from (comparative) obscurity by Film Comment’s editors and correspondents: Target/Mishen (Alexander Zeldovich) and A Stoker/Kochegar (Alexei Balabanov) explore the broken-down dark comedy in present and future Russia; Mortem (Eric Atlan) and Snowtown (Justin Kurzel) promise to thrill even the most hardened horror fans; Transfer (Damir Lukacevic) and Alps/Alpeis (Yorgos Lanthimos) reveal what happens when people are given the opportunity to literally escape themselves.

Even if you’re a well-traveled polyglot, there’s something new for you to learn: we’ve got All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis’s (The Power of Nightmares, Century of the Self) latest documentary. If Curtis’s elegantly constructed cinematic essay on the link between Silicon Valley and Objectivism is too much of a bummer, there’s also Michael Glawogger’s Whores' Glory, a triptych about the mundane realities of sex work in the West and in the developing world. Similarly not your cup of tea? How about prog-rock gods Pink Floyd in their seminal rock-doc, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii.

And, if you haven’t seen it yet, there will also be a screening of Margaret with the director and cast.

Film Comment Selects runs February 17 – March 1. For a full lineup and descriptions of the films, check out the official press release.

In association with KPCW in Park City, the Film Society of Lincoln Center supported The Daily Buzz, a nine-day podcast series from Utah during this year's Sundance Film Festival. Catch up with this year's festival below via each of our daily shows from the festival.

The Daily Buzz, Day 1
Film Society's first broadcast from Park City, UT is a preview of this year's festival including films and filmmakers to watch, a recap of Art House Convergence, and a discussion of the business side of one of the most exciting events on the cinema calendar. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 2
In a second installment from Park City, UT, conversations with a Ira Sachs (Keep The Lights On), Sally El Hosani (My Brother The Devil), HBO doc chief Sheila Nevins and a roundtable of journalists. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 3
Listen to our podcast of Saturday's show, featuring producer Ted Hope of Double Hope Films; the cast and crew of Simon Killer; Brian Knappenberger, director of We Are Legion; and a roundtable exploring the Slamdance Film Festival. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 4
Day four of our Sundance podcast saw guests John Cooper and Trevor Groth, the festival's Director and Director of Programming, respectively; Joe Berlinger, director of Under African Skies; Andrea Arnold, director of Wuthering Heights; and Matt Dentler of Cinetic Media / Film Buff. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 5
Monday's guests included a critics roundtable made up of Peter Debruge of Variety, Greg Elllwood from HitFix, and Logan Hill from GQ, directors and producers of Sundance films Shut Up and Play the Hits and Finding North, as well as Janet Pierson of SXSW Festival. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 6
Tuesday's show began with a discussion of the legacy of indie film champion Bingham Ray with David Dorius and Christine Vachon, followed by chats with Sundance directors Craig Zobel (Compliance) and David and Nathan Zellner (Kid Thing) and a very special appearance by comic book icon Stan Lee! [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 7
Today’s edition of The Daily Buzz marked one week into the Sundance Film Festival. Eugene Hernandez was joined by a half-dozen guests, including Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 8
More than a week into this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Daily Buzz reflects on the films that have impressed audiences so far, as well as what the festival still has to offer in its final days. [Podcast]

The Daily Buzz, Sundance Day 9
The future of Sundance, the war on drugs and Kubrick’s role in “faking” the U.S. moon landing: welcome to this year’s final edition of The Daily Buzz. [Podcast]

This Wednesday, Film Society of Lincoln Center is excited to present a very special continuation of our year-long celebration of the 50-year history of the New York Film Festival—a Jonathan Demme double feature! From the 15th installment of the festival in 1977, we will screen the director's wide-reaching comedy and NYFF debut Handle with Care. As a bonus we will also show his double-Oscar winning, stranger-than-fiction film Melvin and Howard (NYFF '80). The evening will be highlighted by a Q&A with Demme and actor Paul Le Mat between screenings—all for the price of a single admission!

Handle with Care follows the stories of several characters in a small town, all of whom are united by their use of CB (citizen's band) radio. Guided by Demme’s humanist screwball touch, the film moves from wacky to earnest in a stunning composition. Reviewing the film after its initial screening at NYFF in 1977, The New York Times wrote: “The structure is thoughtful, and some of the imagery is so calculated it seems chilly; on the other hand, the film's surface is flippant and funny, full of talented performers in whimsical, open-ended roles.” This screening doubly opportune for cinephiles, as Handle with Care is not available on DVD.

Three years later, Demme and Le Mat reunited for Melvin and Howard, the bizarre real-life story of one Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas-station owner who became the subject of a national media feeding frenzy when he was named as a beneficiary of over $150 million in the much-contested “Mormon will” of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. The film focuses on Melvin's scattered, up-and-down life, his spendthrift, trust-in-luck nature and unwavering belief in the American dream. With Demme helming, and powered by sensational, effective performances from the leading men, Pauline Kael was moved to write: “This picture suggests what it might have been like if Jean Renoir had directed a Preston Sturges comedy.”

Click here for tickets and more info about this unique evening of film. "50 Years of the New York Film Festival" will continue next Tuesday, February 7 with the 1978 classic Gates of Heaven, featuring an in-person Q&A with legendary director Errol Morris!

Below is a full list of all the films that played alongside Handle with Care at NYFF in 1977:
One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (L’une chante l’autre pas)
Agnès Varda, France, 1977.  
Shown with Music Of The Spheres, Jordan Belson, USA.

L’enfant de paris
Léonce Perret, France, 1913 (A NYFF Retrospective).

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos milagres)
Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Brazil, 1977.  

Men of Bronze
William Miles, U.S.A, 1977.
Shown with Children of Labor, Noel Buckner, USA.

The American Friend (Der amerikanishe freund)
Wim Wenders, West Germany/France, 1977.

My Father, My Master (Padre padrone)
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 1977.

Pafnucio santo
Rafael Corkidi, Mexico, 1976.
Shown with Nightmare, Aleksandar Marks, Yugoslavia. 

The Truck (Le camion)
Marguerite Duras, France, 1977.
Shown with Grandpa, Stephen L. Forman, Paul Desaulniers USA.  

Short Eyes,
Robert M. Young, U.S.A., 1977. 

The Devil Probably (Le diable probablement)
Robert Bresson, France, 1977.  
Shown with Glove Story, Eli Noyes, USA.  

Salò
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/ France, 1975.

Heart of Glass (Herz aus glas)
Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1976.
Shown with La soufrièr, Werner Herzog.West Germany.  

The Man Who Loved Women (L’homme qui aimait les femmes)
François Truffaut, France, 1977.

Omar Gatlato
Merzak Allouache, Algeria, 1977.
Shown with Striptease, Bruno Bozzetto, Guido Manuli, Italy.  

Roseland
James Ivory, U.S.A., 1977.  
Shown with Part of Your Loving, Tony de Nonno, USA.

Hot Tomorrows
Martin Brest, USA, 1977.
Shown with Moya Babuska (My Grandmother) Kote Mikaberidze, U.S.S.R.

Women (Ök ketten)
Márta Mézáros, Hungary, 1977.  
Shown with What I Did Not Tell The Prince, Jiri Brdecka, Czechoslovakia.  
Also, Single Fathering, Ron Taylor, USA.  

The Lacemaker (La dentellière)
Claude Goretta, Switzerland/France/West Germany, 1977.  

1900
Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1976.
*Note:  Alberto Grimaldi, the producer, would or could not commit this film to the NYFF until after our annual NY Times ad had gone to press.  Rather than lose the film we filled the spot with a question mark, but word was out and the question mark was the first film to sell out. 

That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir)
Luis Buñuel, France/Spain, 1977. 

Special Events
SAVED!, A retrospective of twelve American films from the preservation vaults of the AFI, George Eastman House, MoMA and UCLA:
Downstairs, Monta Bell, 1932.
The Letter, Monta Bell, 1929.
The Torrent, Monta Bell, 1926.
Paid, Sam Wood, 1930. 
City Girl, F.W. Murnau, 1930.
Transatlantic, William K Howard, 1931.
Wild Oranges, King Vidor, 1924.
Regeneration, Raoul Walsh, 1915.
It, Clarence Badger, 1927.
It’s The Old Army Game, Edward Sutherland, 1926. Dodsworth, William Wyler, 1936.
Liliom, Frank Borzage, 1930. 

An Animation Festival: Five programs including 76 short animated films of all types.

Terence Nance, writer, director and star of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Photo by Eugene Hernandez / FSLC.

The future of Sundance, the war on drugs and Kubrick’s role in “faking” the U.S. moon landing: welcome to this year’s final edition of “The Daily Buzz.”

Our radio collaboration with KPCW from Sundance, the program, hosted by Film Society’s Eugene Hernandez,  has sought over the past week to bring the top talents and minds at the festival to people outside Park City. Friday’s edition was packed: it featured filmmakers, leaders of the Sundance Institute and jurors (including the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s chief programmer, Richard Peña). A complete archive of podcasts from the show is available at kpcw.org.

At issue today were diverse concerns: David France and Howard Gertler joined to discuss How to Survive a Plague, a documentary about how a diagnois of HIV has evolved from what it once meant,  and Eugene Jarecki broke down The House I Live In, his new film on the so-called “war on drugs.” The film reports that the drug war has cost more than $1 trillion and led to 45 million arrests.  “And for all that, it has not reduced the supply of drugs. It has not reduced the demand,” Jarecki said. “It has failed on every promised aspect of its goals.”

Other guests included Chris Horton and Keri Putnam, of the Sundance Institute; Terence Nance, who is behind the festival hit An Oversimplification of Her Beauty; and Sundance jurors Fenton Bailey, Justin Lin and Peña, who attended Sundance for the first time this year.

Perhaps the show’s most entertaining tidbit came from the first segment, which featured writers David Poland (Movie City News), Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times) and Robert Koehler (Variety). Among many other movies, they spotlighted Room 237, a new documentary that examines a bizarre subculture of conspiracy and in-jokes surrounding the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The best contention: that the film contains hidden codes that reveal Kubrick’s role in the supposed faking of the U.S. moon landing in 1969.

The complete podcast is above. Track us anytime on Twitter, ask questions or join the conversation using #SundanceBuzz.

Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick, directors of The Invisible War. Photo by Eugene Hernandez / FSLC.

More than a week into this year’s Sundance Film Festival, "The Daily Buzz" reflects on the films that have impressed audiences so far, as well as what the festival still has to offer in its final days.

In today’s roundtable discussion, the "The Daily Buzz" talked with writers about their Sundance favorites and the state of the industry. Mark Rabinowitz of CNN/Rabbi Report discussed how the festival has changed since his last visit to the Festival over a decade ago, while Time Out New York’s David Fear gushed about Compliance, one of his surprise favorites of the festival so far. Blogger Tom Hall, who runs his own film festival, explained what makes each festival different and why Sundance in particular is so important.

In The Invisible War, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering shed light on a dark trend in the US military. They shared the techniques they used to get soldiers, both male and female, to open up about the sexual abuse they suffered during their service. The film acts as both a therapeutic release for victims as well as a call to action for change and oversight, with its emotion and sincerity coming across powerfully in the filmmaker’s discussion of the project.

Lucy Walker has been having a good week at Sundance — she won a Jury Prize for her film The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom and also received an Oscar nomination — but she keeps her focus on the important subject matter of her film. Covering the events of the devastating earthquake in Japan last year, her movie came from her love and connections to cherry blossoms. Walker talked about why she felt so compelled to tell the story, and the beauty that came from the chaos.

The mood lightened at the end of the show, when "The Daily Buzz" was joined by Hello, I Must Be Going producer Mary Jane Skalski. Tired after a week of festivities, Skalski was still enthusiastic about everything Sundance has to offer for her and her fellow filmmakers. Her unique take on the film industry is a perfect complement to the experiences of the directors and actors that have stopped by "The Daily Buzz" so far.

Track us anytime on Twitter, ask questions or join the conversation using: #SundanceBuzz.

Film Society of Lincoln Center is proud to host the 40th edition of the Dance on Camera Festival, presented in partnership with Dance Films Association, which includes world premieres, in-person appearances, free events, a student film competition, and dozens of great films about dance!

This unique festival kicks off with the world premiere of Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance on Friday at 8:30pm. The film documents the Joffrey Ballet from its struggling beginning in 1956 through its rise to international prominence.  It also provides a look at the inner workings of a renowned ballet theater, featuring founders Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, and dancers including Gary Chryst, Trinette Singleton, Helgi Tomasson and Kevin McKenzie. The film's premiere and second screening (Saturday at 1:30pm) will both feature appearances by current and former Joffrey Ballet dancers including Trinette Singleton, who appeared on the famous Time magazine cover of the ballet in 1968.

This year's Centerpiece film, Musical Chairs, comes from Desperately Seeking Susan director Susan Seidelman. It tells the romantic story of two New Yorkers from different backgrounds, Armando (EJ Bonilla) from the Bronx and Mia (Leah Pipes) of the Upper East Side, who bond over their love for ballroom dancing. When Mia is hospitalized after a tragic accident, Armando helps her dance again by encouraging her to train for competitive wheelchair ballroom dancing. Susan Seidelman will be in person for a Q&A after Saturday's 8:30pm screening.

On Friday and Sunday night, you can catch Dance Film Narratives, a selection of four shorts that tell dramatic stories through dance. These films range from an energetic dance-battle between two enemies (Coup de grâce) to an existential thriller chronicling a story of jealousy (Labyrinth Within). Other selections include stand-out documentaries such as Makarova: In a Class of Her Own, an exploration of the life of famed prima ballerina Natalia Makarova as she works with Irina Yakobsen; Never Stand Still, the remarkable story of the Jacob's Pillow dance center; and Wayne McGregor - Going Somewhere, about the ground-breaking and limit-testing contemporary modern dance pieces of The Royal Ballet's resident choreographer McGregor's. All these films include appearances by filmmakers and many will have dancers in person as well. Many of the films are also accompanied by dance shorts.

The festival closes with Check Your Body at the Door, which sheds light on House dance culture. The film features underground footage culminated over the past thirty years that stars major dancers of the genre, who helped bring attention to House music and consequently created a repertoire of dance moves that persist today.

Other highlights of the Dance on Camera Festival include Meet the Artist forums, Shorts Program and the Dance Film Association's Student Film Competition, all of which are free Amphitheater events. Forums include conversations with influential ballet industry professionals. This year's Shorts Program selections are experimental explorations of love, emancipation and fantasy. The first DFA Student Film Competition invited high school students from five boroughs to submit dance films that were one to five minutes long. These films were to highlight the tight relationship between dance and camera. Selected films for the competition will be screened free to the public on Sunday at noon. The winning student filmmaker’s work will be included in the closing night program alongside Check Your Body at the Door.

Accompanying Dance on Camera Festival is Herbert Migdoll's "Joffrey's Carousel: Celebrating 50 Years of Dance" photo exhibit at Walter Reade Theater's Furman Gallery. Migdoll, who is the official photographer of the Joffrey Ballet, photographed the dancers in costume at Chicago's Navy Pier's outdoor carousel, providing a glimpse of the ballet's extensive repertory. "30 Years of Eye on Dance" will also be shown at the Furman. Highlights from this program include influential dance figures like Alvin Ailey, Agnes de Mille, and Lloyd Newson being interviewed by producer, editor and the host Celia Ipiotis.

Dance on Camera runs from January 27 – 31 and comprises 14 fascinating programs. For more information, a full list of films, and tickets check out the series page.

Today’s edition of “The Daily Buzz” marked one week into the Sundance Film Festival, and there were signs of wear: half the guests seemed to have lost their voices. But that didn’t stop the show’s guest critics and filmmakers alike from exuberantly touting their top films of the festival so far.

One obvious bright spot so far is Beasts of the Southern Wild, a Sundance discovery that was quickly acquired by Fox Searchlight and seems sure to become one of 2012’s most-discussed movies. Difficult to thoroughly describe, the film pivots around a young girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her dad in a sequestered lower Delta island community in Louisiana amid a series of fantastical experiences sparked by her father's illness. On the show, director Benh Zeitlin tells Film Society’s Eugene Hernandez that he embarked on a guerrilla search to find the girl at the film's heart, and he loved so many he auditioned he eventually made some male characters female.

In an earlier segment with Anne Thompson and David Ansen, Beasts also dominated the conversation, with Thompson breathlessly praising it and Ansen not far behind. “I’d been hearing hype, which always makes me nervous,” he joked—but the film didn’t let him down. Another film discussed in the segement was The Surrogate, a drama that has sparked alarmingly early 2013 Oscar talk for John Hawkes and Helen Hunt.

Bart Layton, director of documentary The Impostor, joined the show to break down his decision to use reenactments in the movie (“a dirty word,” as he called it) and the elusive question of what it means to be a documentary in the first place. Layton posits that the film—the jaw-dropping, fact-based story of a San Antonio family that receives a boy who claims to be their missing teenage son— had to be told with a blend of documentary and old-fashioned narrative techniques or it simply would have seemed too preposterous.

The show concluded with John Sloss of Cinetic Media, a consummate Sundance insider whose work plays a pivotal role in the festival as one of the premiere marketplaces for American independents.

Listen to the whole podcast of Tuesday's show above. Track us anytime on Twitter, ask questions or join the conversation using: #SundanceBuzz.

Tuesday's edition of “The Daily Buzz” opened with the tragic news of the death of friend and indie film champion Bingham Ray, an attempt to move past the shock of his loss and into a discussion of his singular legacy. It’s a long discussion.

David Douris, who knew Ray since high school, joined FIlm Society's’s Eugene Hernandez and Christine Vachon of Killer Films to pin down what his work ultimately meant to independent film and to the industry at large. They focused on the much-debated Happiness (1998), which they cited as a turning point in Hollywood’s romance with independent film in the 1990s. Asked to parse Ray’s impact for a new generation, Dorius said he showed that “the films have to be good, you have to respect your directors, you have to fight to protect what you’re making—and recognize that it is a fight.”

Subsequent guests included Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, who discussed what led Midnight to Paris to four Oscar nominations and some of the best box office of Woody Allen’s career, and brothers David and Nathan Zellner, Sundance habitués who returned this year with Kid Thing. The latter were joined by Craig Zobel, who was at the festival with Compliance, his intensely received film about the disturbing fallout of a prank call to the manager of a fast-food joint. 

Tuesday’s guest of honor, however, was Stan Lee, who appeared with the director of a new documentary on him, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. Turning 90 this year, Lee charmingly hijacked the discussion to explain why they made a movie about him (“I was adorable”) and even ruminated on the enduring popularity of comic books.          

The show wound down with inevitable discussion of the Oscar nominations with several critics, which homed in on an overall sense of film nostalgia in this year’s top contenders—or, as one guest less charitably put it, Hollywood’s desire to celebrate itself.

Listen to the whole podcast of Tuesday's show above. Track us anytime on Twitter, ask questions or join the conversation using: #SundanceBuzz.