Jacob Burns

This month’s edition of Jonathan Demme’s "Rarely Seen Cinema" features what will no doubt be an eye-opening and inspiring Q&A with activist Majora Carter.

A MacArthur "genius" grant recipient, Ms. Carter is a prominent and innovative activist who views urban renewal through an environmental lens, drawing a direct connection between ecological, economic and social degradation. As witnessed in her 2006 TED Talk, Carter is fearless, persistent and inspiring. Through her work at Sustainable South Bronx and her consulting firm, The Majora Carter Group, Ms. Carter has pushed for eco-friendly practices, job training and green-related economic development. Carter’s inspired ideas coupled with her renowned persistence led to the first open-waterfront park in the South Bronx in 60 years, Hunts Point Riverside Park. Carter is now putting the green economy and green economic tools to use within the cities of New Orleans, Detroit, and the small coastal towns of northeastern North Carolina.

FILM: Pray For Japan
Pray for Japan focuses on the March 11, 2011 earthquake and devastating tsunami that followed. Through various vantage points, the film examines the vast ramifications of this large-scale natural disaster – and the battle real-life heroes fought on behalf of their loved ones and their hometown.

"Since I am quoting my old reviews today, let it be noted that I wrote in my review of [Very Bad Things]: ' [Peter] Berg shows that he can direct a good movie, even if he hasn't.' Now he has." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

This month's Rarely Seen selection falls into the shameless entertainment category. The Rundown is a hyper-kinetic action comedy from the director of Friday Night Lights and the upcoming summer blockbuster Battleship. The film stars The Rock as a bounty-hunter who treks down to the Amazon to find the archeologist son of a billionaire. Overloaded with raucous set-pieces and super-charged with stylish direction, the film gets stolen by Christopher Walken as a slave-driving mining magnate standing in the way of our hero. His speech about the tooth fairy is priceless – and a perfect example of The Rundown’s genuinely idiosyncratic blend of off-beat humor and action tropes. Watch out for a cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he passes the metaphorical Action Hero torch to The Rock.

It’s Vietnam-era San Francisco, and the life of physician Archie (George C. Scott) is in turmoil as his marriage collapses. Things only get more complicated when dazzling - and troubled - young newlywed Petulia (Julie Christie) decides she intends to marry him instead. Gorgeously shot by Nicolas Roeg and innovative in narrative and style, this provocative, affecting dissection of Summer of Love manners and mores features first-rate acting.

Q&A w/host Jonathan Demme and award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn (In America, Leaving Las Vegas) will be co-moderating this event and will provide insight into the work of legendary cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (other credits include: Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd).

Many consider Mon oncle d'Amerique to be one of Alain Resnais best films. The didactic film won the Grand Prize at Cannes when it debuted thirty years ago. Starring Gerard Depardieu, Mon oncle d'Amerique uses the life story of three siblings to illustrate the ideas of French physician, writer and philosoper, Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film.

Duck, You Sucker is ipso facto a marvelous film and a fantastic western simply because it comes from one of the greatest of maestros, Sergio Leone! It’s all here (in a movie sometimes known as A Fistful of Dynamite or Once Upon a Time...the Revolution)—huge star performances from James Coburn and Rod Steiger, spectacular location photography, phenomenal action and staging, superb cutting, sumptuous visual design—and yet another truly magnifico score from Ennio Morricone, maybe Leone’s most vital ongoing creative collaborator. -Jonathan Demme

Q&A Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme

The delightful director Richard Lester’s (Hard Day’s Night) unsung and rarely screened romantic tale of Robin Hood starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The film picks up the Robin Hood legend some twenty years after most versions of the story, with Robin and his sidekick Little John returning to their old Sherwood haunts world-weary from the Crusades and their sickening brutality. Also features Robert Shaw, Richard Harris, Nicol Williamson and Denholm Elliot.

Join us for a post-screening discussion with series host Jonathan Demme.

Join us for an Extra Special Edition of "Jonathan Demme Presents Rarely Seen Cinema!" This month, Demme has selected the 2001 sci-fi drama, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Based on the 1969 short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, A.I. was adapted for the screen by Spielberg from Stanley Kubrick's treatment. In a film whose resonance in the technology age only grows with time, Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense) stars as David, the first robot designed to experience love. Featuring an all-star cast that includes Sam Robards, Frances O’Connor, Jude Law, Robin Williams, William Hurt, and Meryl Streep.

Q&A Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme will be joined by writer Jenny Lumet (Rachel Getting Married) and New York Times critic Janet Maslin for a post screening discussion.

Providence is for me a truly MAGNIFICENT motion picture. It is Alain Resnais at the peak of his cinematic powers—and it’s in English! It’s got predictably exquisite performances by the 14-carat cast (John Gielgud, Ellen Burstyn, Dirk Bogarde) and a revolutionary, dimension-shifting narrative form that is just challenging enough to guarantee delicious thematic epiphanies as the edgy, witty, and profoundly moving story unfolds. If I were forced one day to name the one movie I love the most of all, Providence would for sure be the first title to go on that very short list. And what a SUBLIME score by the brilliant Miklós Rózsa (google him—you won’t believe this composer’s accomplishments)!” —JD

Jonathan Demme picked Four Friends as a tribute to his own friend the great director/producer Arthur Penn, who passed away last fall. In Penn’s touching look at the sixties, we see it all through the joyful and wrenching experiences of a group of friends. They start the movie—and the decade—as high school seniors, and end up in places they never would have been able to predict or even imagine.

Jonathan Demme: 

“I saw Silentium at the International Festival of Police Films in Cognac, France a couple of years ago when I was on the jury there. It’s a phenomenally smart, funny, and terrifically suspenseful entertainment made in, of all places, Austria! Beyond being a gripping and moving thriller with beaucoup laughs along the way, Silentium is a virtual illumination of the art of filmmaking: every aspect of this picture is rendered with exceptional skill and artistry—storytelling, performances, editing, cinematography—everything!

“Silentium ran away with the grand prize for best film at Cognac, and I actually made an effort to find a distributor in America to release it. But all were concerned that due to its overt artistry, intelligence, and fine taste matched with its utter absence of cheap thrills, horror and sensationalism that Silentium might have too great a challenge competing with the kind of films making the moolah at the box office today.

“If you’re an adventurous movie-goer, you’ve got to come to see this incredibly rare showing of this wonderful contemporary movie!” —JD

Only the second screening ever in the U.S.! 

“I saw this picture when it came out and I was totally dazzled by its wild originality, courage, audacity, and sheer cinematic energy. Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel. Australia and India. Sexually and spiritually startling. I remember Holy Smoke as proof positive of the fact that Jane Campion is one of the very finest and boldest filmmakers on the planet.” — Jonathan Demme

A young Australian (Kate Winslet) has a spiritual awakening while in India. Her worried parents hire a deprogrammer (Harvey Keitel) to ensure her safe return, but her wit, iron will, and sexuality threaten to upset their plans. From the director of The Piano.

Q&A: host Jonathan Demme

One of the great landmarks of cinema, this silent film stars Renée Falconetti in what Pauline Kael said “may be the finest performance ever recorded.” This haunting portrayal of the country girl from Orléans who led the French in their defeat of the British and eventually died for God and country is famous for its intimacy and power.

LIVE PERFORMANCE In the Nursery, a noted two-man musical group composed of Klive and Nigel Humberstone, joins us from London with its hypnotic new score. Blending electronica with a symphonic style, In the Nursery has performed its original soundtracks for silent classics around the world.

CQ takes you behind the scenes of a sci-fi thriller being filmed in 1969 Paris—but set in "futuristic" 2001! A novice filmmaker has just been given the chance of a lifetime, but when he starts to believe that his on-screen heroine is seducing him from within the film, he risks his job and his sanity to join her in an adventure beyond even his imagination. A vibrant cast, including Gerard Depardieu and Billy Zane, shines in this unpredictable movie where past meets future, reality blurs with fantasy, and tight leather catsuits are the perfect accessory for a ray gun that can stop time!

Q&A with host Jonathan Demme

The teachings of the People’s Saint—humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice—are conveyed in vignettes cowritten by Federico Fellini. A gorgeous portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.

Q&A with host Jonathan Demme

A surreal, oddball parody of the life of Christ in which a zoot-suited drifter lands in a small Old West town, begins performing “miracles,” and discovers his true calling.

Q&A: director Robert Downey Sr. and host Jonathan Demme. Robert Downey Sr. has led a career over half a century as an actor, producer, writer, cinematographer, and independent filmmaker. Best known for Putney Swope (1969), a scathing satire of Madison Avenue, Downey initially achieved renown during the 60s as an underground filmmaker with a string of surrealist, absurdist, and avant-garde films.

 "A horrifying, mortifyingly violent movie." (Jonathan Demme)

When two young couples this attractive go on an idyllic vacation in Mexico you can be sure something awful is bound to happen. Based on the best-seller by Scott Smith, and disturbingly gory to the extreme, the film operates in the “tourist terror” sub-genre, but creates something much more unique, bizarre, and frightening than most typical Hollywood horror fare.

Q&A: host Jonathan Demme and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Scott Smith, who wrote the novels and film adaptations for both The Ruins and A Simple Plan.

In his poetic fourth feature, Ray brings his singular vision to this spectacle of music, dance, and powerful narrative. Roger Ebert called it "the story of a man who has been compared to King Lear because of his pride, stubbornness, and the way he loses everything that matters."

This film was restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project at the Academy Film Archive with funding from the Film Foundation.  Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Two years after Easy Rider Peter Fonda made his directing debut with this Western, lyrically filmed by the master Vilmos Zgismond. Over the next decades The Hired Hand was rarely shown theatrically, until it was rediscovered and gained a cult following.

The languid, visually rich story of an adolescent girl’s journey into womanhood was shot on the banks of the Ganges in pastoral India. It’s one of the most beautiful color films ever made—and here it is in a Technicolor print struck in 2006.

After his release from prison, Bruno (played by Bruno S., from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) is ready for a change. He allies himself with a downtrodden prostitute, and they make their way to Wisconsin, of all places. Funny, bizarre, and deeply Herzog in every sense, this tale of the American dream gone awry on the snowbound prairie has magnetic power.
 

In Ashby’s (Shampoo, Harold and Maude) powerful, steamy Vietnam drama, Jane Fonda plays a military wife whose narrow world opens up when her husband is deployed. Volunteering at the VA hospital, she gets to know a ferocious young vet (Jon Voight), who came home a haunted paraplegic, and her life is changed forever. With Oscar-winning performances from the two leads, cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler, and a perfect, path-breaking soundtrack.

One of the finest films by one of the world’s most prolific and unpredictable directors, Ali tells of a 60ish German widow who falls in love with a Moroccan man 20 years her junior. Together, they struggle to overcome the stark disapproval of neighbors, shopkeepers, and even their own families.

In the movie that made him a star, Jack Nicholson plays a promising concert pianist who has renounced middle-class American life—until his father’s illness summons him home. Incisive and funny, this is a time capsule of life in a chaotic period of America’s history. Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Actor.

Still able to traumatize after more than a quarter-century, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a sly social commentary rendered in a psychotically psychedelic style that’s unmatched in the history of horror cinema. This vastly influential shocker has rarely been beat for sheer, exhilarating terror.

"A riot of samurai lore, peppered with quicksilver fights and winking humor." (New York Magazine)

This big-budget celebration of the 19th-century blind warrior Zatoichi features spectacular swordplay and a rich lode of emotion. Starring cult filmmaker, writer, and actor Takeshi Kitano, this is "the rare exploitation film that values relationships over bloodshed. But the bloodshed is still pretty awesome" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Also known as Legends from a Southern Island, this truly rare, epic film is unavailable in either DVD or VHS! While relatively unknown in the US, Shohei Imamura, the first Japanese director to win two Palme d’Or awards at Cannes, is regarded as one of the most important and outrageous filmmakers in Japanese cinema. This is the story of a Tokyo engineer who arrives on a tropical island and comes face to face with a primitive culture governed by superstition and bizarre ritual.

From one of the favorite directors in this series (Muriel, Same Old Song, and La Guerre est Finie), this period piece features a cocky Jean-Paul Belmondo as a swindler who dazzles 1930s French society, eventually leading it into ruin. Charles Boyer won Best Actor at Cannes for his great performance as a baron who sponsors the swindler.

Towering Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s (Man of Marble) remarkable meditation on the tragic death of his favorite leading man, who died running for a train. A knockout of a film.

One of the first films to come out of postrevolutionary Iran, The Runner “ranks with those classics of childhood, Shoeshine and The 400 Blows” (San Francisco Chronicle). While survival is a constant struggle for the orphan boy at the heart of the movie, he finds passionate joy in running.

A brilliant view of a shattered marriage, this movie has got it all: a Harold Pinter screenplay based on a witty Penelope Mortimer novel, an intriguingly intricate structure, and outstanding performances by a top-flight cast led by Anne Bancroft (who earned a Best Actress nomination for her performance), Peter Finch, and James Mason.

A hip young Parisian searches Romania for a gypsy singer, appearing as exotic to the villagers he meets as they are to him (and us). Earthy, joyous, and warm—and made by the filmmaker who brought us the musically intoxicating Latcho Drom—Gadjo Dilo conveys a rare insider's view of life among the Romany (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe.

Against the backdrop of a France wrenched by the memory of World War II and its recent defeat in Algeria, the magnetic Delphine Seyrig plays a widow whose reunion with an old lover is complicated by the presence of his current mistress and her own unstable stepson. A tale of lost love and obsession and one of the rarely seen masterpieces of the great Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad).

Told from the decidedly off-center perspectives of three parties involved in the outrageous events surrounding a botched drug deal, this breakneck, raucous comedy takes place over 24 hours in L.A. and Las Vegas. With Sarah Polley as a 20-something supermarket cashier short on rent, Katie Holmes as her best friend, William Fichtner as the scariest cop you’ll ever see, and a manic tangle of other young actors.

Winning awards at Cannes and from the New York Film Critics Circle, this film set in Budapest after the 1956 revolution focuses on changing times in Hungary through the experience of one family. The moody, evocative cinematography is by the great Lajos Koltai, who directed Fateless and the upcoming Evening (starring Meryl Streep).

The classic music documentary that gives us the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, celebrated by a joyous crowd of jazz enthusiasts. "One of the most pleasurable of all concert films" (Pauline Kael), it features Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and other music greats.

In a rare American appearance, South Korean movie star Park joins us with one of his best known films, Nowhere to Hide. He plays a detective hunting down the leader of a massive drug cartel in this fast-paced, violent thriller that boasts one jaw-dropping set piece after another. A big hit at Sundance.

A prizewinner at Cannes, this “indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity” (New York Times) is a bold parable about teachers in search of students in remote Iranian Kurdistan. From one of Iran’s most promising young filmmakers, the daughter of the legendary director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar).

The characters regularly express themselves in song—from Maurice Chevalier to Serge Gainsbourg—in an entertaining patchwork of interconnected stories about life in Paris.

Stylish and ultraviolent, this big-budget story of urban warfare between a team of Interpol officers and a group of Hong Kong mercenaries is all about the action. This is the first East Coast theatrical screening of this incredible film, virtually unseen in this country.

This heartbreaking and magnificent story of a donkey’s life and death in rural France is a masterpiece by one of the greatest 20th-century filmmakers.

In this moody noir love story filled with mixed signals and illusions, a mysterious, beautiful woman disappears and another emerges— or at least it seems that way. Powerfully simple and enigmatic.

A brilliant, absurd collection of straight-faced vignettes about life. Critics compare the director’s command to Stanley Kubrick’s and his wildly original humor to Jacques Tati, Monty Python, and Salvador Dalí all rolled into one.

This oft-overlooked film by Oscar winner Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) is a quiet, brutal view of a bloody chapter in Civil War history, pitting friend against friend along the Kansas-Missouri border.

Based on filmmaker Amos Gitai's own experience, this first Israeli feature to depict the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 is a daring and devastating portrait of the horrors of combat.

Lamerica is a “spare, supremely eloquent” (New York Times) story about a get-rich-quick scheme two Italian men bring to the impoverished Albanian countryside. Critically acclaimed and winner of many, many awards, this intelligent, beautifully made movie lives up to its reputation.

In his only American film, an underrated tale of ephemeral happiness, Jacques Demy turns his camera on a young man, played by Gary Lockwood, who falls for the gorgeous Anouk Aimée, a model at a Los Angeles store where lonely men go to photograph sexy young women.

A lurid and brilliant film by a great young director, a graduate of Purchase College. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky but dealing with high school violence, it was eclipsed by the 1999 Columbine shootings and never received its due.

Imprisoned in a British military "glasshouse" in Northern Africa during World War II, a group of soldiers including Sean Connery's insubordinate sergeant major are put through a grueling gauntlet of sadistic exercises meant to crush their spirits. Tensions mount as Lumet examines unyielding defiance in the face of brutal authority. A riveting and unjustly overlooked film, winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes.

A lyrical, documentary look at gypsy culture told through song and image. A dramatic journey—from India to Spain—Latcho Drom focuses on the values and lifestyle of Romany's nomadic culture.

Resnais applied cutting-edge New Wave filmmaking techniques to a standard spy thriller, and the results are gripping. Yves Montand stars as a member of the Marxist underground fomenting revolution in Fascist Spain. When eager Parisian student Genevieve Bujold enters the picture, the situation quickly gets complicated.

A young NYPD detective (Michael Moriarty) learns the hard way about the politics that govern a big-city police department when he becomes involved in a department cover-up following a murder. Also featuring Yaphet Kotto, Tony King, Susan Blakely, William Devane and Hector Elizondo. Based on the novel James Mills.

Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella owes much to Buñuelian surrealism in this story about three characters—a professor, a writer, and an orchestra conductor—who attend a grand literary cocktail party, where the writer is being honored for his book, The Warsaw Bridge. The New York Times calls this film an "aesthetic of narrative enigma, elegant camerawork and attractive people who speak in literary and intellectual riddles."

Conrad Rooks' wild, hallucinatory tale of his journey back from drug addiction is a tour de force of cinematography (by the legendary Robert Frank) with an ecstatic soundtrack featuring Ravi Shankar, Ornette Coleman, The Fugs, and others. One of the stunning, forgotten cult films of the sixties.