Now the top-selling female artist in the world, Yayoi Kusama overcame impossible odds to bring her radical artistic vision to the world stage. For decades, her work pushed boundaries that often alienated her from both her peers and those in power in the art world. Kusama was an underdog with everything stacked against her: the trauma of growing up in Japan during World War II, life in a dysfunctional family that discouraged her creative ambitions, sexism and racism in the art establishment, mental illness in a culture where that was particularly shameful and even continuing to pursue and be devoted to her art full time on the cusp of her 90s. In spite of it all, Kusama has endured and has created a legacy of artwork that spans the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation art, performance art, poetry and literary fiction. After working as an artist for over six decades, people around the globe are experiencing her installation Infinity Mirrored Rooms in record numbers, as Kusama continues to create new work every day.
“‘KUSAMA: INFINITY,’…makes a convincing case that the art world and the general public are still catching up with the influence of Yayoi Kusama,” –Ben Kenigsberg, NYTimes
“Lenz’s frank, admiring approach adds a sense of clarity that gives the film an undeniable potency.” –Allison Shoemaker, Rogerebert.com
“the film makes clear that there is a powerful quality of healing to her art, both for the artist and the viewer.” –Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post
As many comedians will attest, nobody captured the hearts of the 70’s and 80’s (as well as the cultural zeitgeist) quite like Gilda Radner. She ascended through the boys club of The National Lampoon straight into stardom as the first performer ever cast for Saturday Night Live. Lisa Dapolito’s new documentary mines through years and years of never-before-seen photos, audio recordings, and archival footage to tell the story of Gilda Radner, from her days at SNL to her all-too-soon passing of ovarian cancer in 1991. Countless comedians followed in the footsteps of Radner and many make appearances here in the documentary, including Melissa McCarthy, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, and Steve Martin.
“Understandably weighted toward her years on Saturday Night Live, the polished debut offers a chance to both reconnect with her most famous recurring characters there and to marvel at the amount of fun she clearly had in Studio 8H.” –John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“…even with Radner gone for nearly three decades, she and her mile-wide smile rule every moment and image.” –Kate Erbland, IndieWire
“…the gone-too-soon SNL star and comedic genius of the 1970s and ’80s is still making us laugh all these years later.” –Brandon Katz, New York Observer
Contributed by Stacy Brick, guest programmer of our family-friendly SUNDAY SCHOOL series.
In an interview about the “unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, director Christopher Nolan talked about seeing the film for the first time at age 7. “I had the extraordinary experience of being transported in a way that I hadn’t realized was possible. The screen just opened up and I went on this incredible journey,” he said. Movies have changed quite a bit since 1977 (when Nolan saw the film), but 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is still a rarity. I was planning to take my 10-year-old son to see the film, but after reading this I figured I would take my 7-year-old daughter along as well.
I’m the programmer for the AFS Sunday School series, so my kids have seen a wide range of films. I would like to think that the foundation prepared them for this moviegoing experience. They’ve seen films like THE RED TURTLE—with no dialogue, and THE YELLOW SUBMARINE—with trippy visuals and groovy music. When I told them we were going to see a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie my son reminded me that AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR was just as long and they made it through that with no problem.
Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of “I can’t sit for 2 more hours,” and “We need to go home,” but all in all they did pretty well. Watching a movie like this with children can often bring you out of the experience, but there were a few moments during the film that were enhanced by their commentary. My son caught a movie reference that would have slipped right by me. When the camera was panning over the Discovery One he said, “It’s just like in SPACEBALLS!” (That one was not a Sunday School selection.) During the psychedelic sequence in the “Beyond”, my daughter kept saying, “Whoa!” in my ear each time the film cut to a new scene. It was pretty great if you ask me.
They have not, however, seen a movie as ambiguous and open-ended as 2001 so the final scenes were the focus of our discussion after the film. Both kids wanted to know how it ended. My son asked, “What was baby Jesus doing there at the end?” They talked it out for a while and we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a correct answer. They seemed OK with that, along with the possibilities it opened up.
The first time I saw 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was on VHS at a slumber party—I was 8. What I mainly remember from the experience is laughing at the “Dawn of Man” portion at the beginning. We all thought the apes were silly and found the part when the bone is thrown in the air and you’re suddenly transported into space particularly amusing. I don’t think we stuck around for the whole movie—more than likely we switched to something else.
Upon entering the theater this weekend I struggled to remember if I had ever seen the film in its entirety—and I still can’t determine that for sure—but something strange happened during the film for me. When the rapid strings and chorus of voices filled the theater during the encounter with the monolith on the moon I immediately recognized the sounds from my childhood nightmares. Quite literally: when I was 8, I had an episode of night terrors featuring hallucinated audio. Turns out it was straight from this film; it was hiding somewhere in my brain and was unearthed while I sat in the theater.
Neither of my kids had a transformative experience like Nolan’s—at least not one they can put their finger on now. Perhaps it needs to percolate in their subconscious for a few decades.
Contributed by Stacy Brick, guest programmer of our family-friendly SUNDAY SCHOOL series.
Check out the new 4K “Unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY for yourself, screening at the AFS Cinema through September 7th.
Reality in Long Shots: A Hou Hsiao-Hsien Retrospective begins Saturday, September 8, at AFS Cinema. Buy your tickets today. Presented in partnership with Austin Asian American Film Festival.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien grew up in the wake of WWII and Japanese occupation of Taiwan, witnessing a generation with bleak outlooks leading bleak lives. Reflecting on his early years of learning to deal with this overarching sense of despair, Hou says he would dive into literature and absorb as much film as he could by sneaking into movie theaters at a young age. These experiences directly informed many of his films and formed the basis of his filmmaking style.
John Berra of BFI outlines the effect of this type of viewing in his profile of the director, “Multiple viewings are often required to settle into Hou’s measured rhythm, but once the necessary internal adjustment has been made, patience gives rise to a rare form of sensory pleasure.” Our retrospective series gives us the ability to observe the development of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s style as he reveals a new understanding of our relationship with our place in time.
THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI, Hou’s fourth feature, witnesses the coming of age of Ah-Ching and his debaucherous friends as they move from their hometown of Fengkeui to find work in the city of Kaohsiung. The boys discover unique new difficulties in life in the city and find themselves torn physically and emotionally between their past and present.
Hou reflects on the work in an interview with Criterion, “this film really broke the conventional ways of doing things and taught me that you have freedom to do whatever you desire, which allowed me to transcend all those dogmatic ways of making films that I was taught in film school.”
Winner of the International Critics’ Prize Award at Berlin Film Festival, this autobiographical work follows a young boy named Ah-Ha and his family as they leave China and move to Taiwan. Ah-Ha acclimates quickly to this change by joining a local gang, but his family grows strained in their longing for the mainland. Hou observes a gradual, deep divide between the boy and his family as they drift apart in this monumental coming-of-age drama.
In his reflection on the work of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Philip Lopate of the New York Times calls this film the directors’ first genuine masterpiece.
Gao is a bottom-tier thug in contemporary Taiwan who coordinates shoddy money-making schemes with his rag tag group of friends. In this slow-burn reconception of the gangster genre, Hou frequently finds his subjects as they lazily navigate in-between moments of their petty crime lifestyle in the sensuous streets of Taiwan. Gao’s absurd dreams of striking it rich are mirrored by a fantastic soundtrack coordinated by musician and co-star, Lim Giong.
Vicky (Shu Qi, THE ASSASSIN) finds relief in the bright lights and designer drugs of the Taipei club scene, then returns to the cluttered apartment she shares with her abusive, good-for-nothing boyfriend Hao-hao (Tuan Chun-hao). A hard-edged but sensitive gangster (Jack Kao) holds out the possibility of a more lasting escape, but Vicky must first break free of the inertia confining her. With MILLENNIUM MAMBO, Hou Hsiao-hsien kicks off the 21st century as only he can, delivering a reflective, neon-drenched mood piece that captures the excitement and ennui of contemporary urban life.
Consisting of only 37 total long shots, FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI is a story told within the candlelit rooms of a 19th century high-end brothel. Hou travels between three of these flower houses, weaving together concurrent experiences of love, ultimately creating what is considered one of the most beautiful films ever made.
In his most overtly political film, Hou chronicles the story of four brothers during a time when thousands of Taiwanese settlers were being murdered or imprisoned by a tyrannical Kuomintang government. Blending the elements of social, familial and personal turmoil that color Hou’s earlier works, A CITY OF SADNESS represents the ability of the director to portray how society affects minute details in the life of the individual. This film was the first Taiwanese film to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and established Hou Hsiao-Hsien as an indelible voice in world cinema.
In an interview about the film, Hou gave a rare insight into his directing process, “The character of Tony Leung’s elder brother in A CITY OF SADNESS is a very dramatic actor so when we were filming, he tended to be overly dramatic for what the scene required. The way to combat this was to pretend to him that we were just doing a test and it wasn’t real, and whenever he felt he was doing a test he would tone it down, for whatever reason, but it was actually a real shot, he just didn’t know it and then the minute I said ‘ok this is a real take’ he would revert back to his very dramatic style. That was the only way to get him to give the more realistic kind of performance that I’m looking for.”
JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION opens Friday, September 7th at AFS Cinema.Tickets are on sale now.
In the 1980’s, the Technical Director of the French Tennis Federation wanted to make instructional films of tennis players in action. His experiments ended with 16mm footage of superstar bad boy John McEnroe at Roland Garros (colloquially called the ‘French Open’). This 16mm footage was later unearthed and became the basis of Julien Faraut’s new documentary, JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION, which uses its source material as a jumping off point into the maddening mind of its subject. Through this perspective, Faraut begins to realize that every expression, every outburst from the famously temperamental player is part of a carefully calculated performance, with the actor’s role being the embodiment of victory itself.
Here’s what critics are saying:
“Julien Faraut’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is the best tennis film ever made.” –Corey Seymour, Vogue Online
“A sports documentary unlike any other, a beguiling and delightful piece of visionary non-fiction.” –David Elrich, IndieWire
“Rising gently from Faraut’s film is the belief that a professional tennis match is more like a movie than it is like anything else.” –Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“A lovely meditation on time and movement, dedication and obsession, image and perception.” –Jessica Kiang, Variety
“Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.” –Wesley Morris, New York Times
JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION opens Friday, September 7th at AFS Cinema.Tickets are on sale now.
WANDA screens at AFS Cinema this weekend, September 1-3. Get tickets today.
Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in WANDA with a crew of four people. They filmed in a Pennsylvania coal town on a $100K budget gifted by Harry Schuster. Without studio pressure, Loden could make the film that she wanted to. “There is a miracle in WANDA,” as Marguerite Duras puts it in her conversation with Elia Kazan, “Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda.”
In a great interview after the film’s premiere in 1971, Loden describes her flight from an “emotionally impoverished” home life to an equally alienating experience dancing at the Copacabana in New York City, the two ways of living that inform her film WANDA.
Here is that unearthed New York Times interview:
Barbara Loden in WANDA
Barbara Loden Speaks Of the World of ‘Wanda’
by Mccandlish Phillips
The film “Wanda” opened recently at the Cinema II under banners of international critical praise. It bears the signature of Barbara Loden —she wrote it, directed it and played its central role—in other than obvious ‘ways.
More than merely a film she has made, Wanda is the woman Miss Loden might have become, before she discovered who she was.
The film was made in express rejection of Hollywood techniques. It was also made in express rejection of national values as Miss Loden sees them.
In its blighted atmosphere, WANDA discloses the poverty and ignorance of Appalachia. It tells of a passive, slatternly young woman who abandons her family and drifts, like a piece of wood caught on a slow tide, through dreary events in motels and bars.
“She’s trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her,” Miss Loden said.
At first, her declaration that the film is in some respects autobiographical seems unlikely, but the improbability dissolves as she talks. Much of her mature life has been, perhaps only half‐consciously, a flight from categorization.
“I really hate slick pictures,” she said, coiled in a green chair in the sitting room in which she presides. as Mrs. Elia Kazan, wife of the stage and film director. The film was edited in a back room of their spacious townhouse near Central Park West.
“They’re too perfect to be believable. I don’t mean just in the look. I mean in the rhythm, in the cutting, the music — everything. The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”
Miss Loden is made up of no parts Formica. Her countenance glows softly without a trace of cosmetics. She has wide, innocent eyes, strong cheekbones, and a turned‐up nose. She wore brown corduroy slacks.
“I tried not to explain things too much in the film, not to be too explicit, not to be too verbal,” she said. “My subject matter is of people who are not too verbal and not aware of their condition.
“I’ve been like that myself. I came from a rural region, where people have a hard time. They don’t have time for wittily observing the things around them. They’re not concerned about anything more than existing from day to day.
“They’re not stupid. They’re ignorant. Everything is ugly around them — the architecture, the town, the clothing they wear. Everything they see is ugly.
“It’s not a matter of money,” Miss Loden said, describing the produce‐and-consume‐and‐produce treadmill.
“It’s the same in Detroit,” she went on. “They work in the factories to make all those ugly cars that don’t last so they can get paid to buy a few of those ugly cars and to buy the things that others are making in other factories—own a color television. It’s a whole aspect of America.”
“Do you have any answer?”
“No, Miss Loden said quietly. “Just to change the whole society.”
The revolutionary currents that are running are evidence of a terminal distaste for the entire setup, she believes.
“People are always saying, ‘Why don’t they work within the system?’ They don’t because the system doesn’t work, you see,” Miss Loden remarked.
“I sort of made my way up, but I know if I had stayed where I came from, I would just be a wasted person.”
By leaving her rural setting near Asheville, N. C., and coming to New York, Miss Loden escaped a life of ignorance and routine drudgery, But she was immediately caught up in another banal categorization.
Since she had “a figure approaching perfection,” as one reviewer put it, and a face that undeniably suggested both the beauty of Bergman and the sensuous glamour, of Monroe (whose image she reflected in “After the Fall”), Miss Loden was credited with exterior assets only.
She danced at the Copacabana. Ernie Kovacs, who knew, a good thing when he saw one, dressed her in very abbreviated tights and had her romp through television slapstick parts. For several years she did little, else.
She sees both of these circumstances — the drab and hollow life at home, and the glittering and hollow life here—as having a single root in a misorganized society.
“I got into the whole thing of being a dumb blonde—sort of an object, as they say. I didn’t think anything of myself, so I succumbed to the whole role. I never knew who I was, or what I was supposed to do.”
Barbara Loden and Elia Kazan
“Do you know now?” “Yes.”
Had Mr. Kazan helped? “He helps me every way he can,” she said. “It’s good to have an expert around. What he tried to do was get me to do what I wanted to do, and that’s not the way he would have done it.”
WANDA was shot in 16mm and printed in 35mm. Miss Loden wrote the screenplay nine years ago. Her awareness of the far simpler techniques of the underground movement encouraged her to attempt it herself.
“It’s not a new wave,” she said. “It’s the old wave. That’s what they used to do. They took a camera and they went out and shot. Around that act this whole fantastic apparatus grew up — the Hollywood albatross. They made a ship out of lead. It won’t float any more.”
WANDA plays at the AFS Cinema on September 1st through 3rd.
Josephine Decker (BUTTER ON THE LATCH, THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY) is back with her newest feature, a favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop’s ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives. Hailed as “one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century,” this inventive film is one you won’t want to miss.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
“In the role of Madeline, Howard delivers a performance that is one of the most distinctive, most varied, and most extreme in its expressive array and technical power, of any teen performer in the history of cinema.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Helena Howard makes a heart-stopping professional debut as Madeline caught between Molly Parker’s manipulative acting teacher and Miranda July’s differently manipulative mom.” Bob Mondello, NPR
“Writer-director Josephine Decker more than earns the label “auteur,” and all the connotations that come with it.” Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
Check out the trailer for Madeline’s Madeline below:
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s new 4K unrestoration opens at AFS Cinema on Friday, August 31. Get tickets.
Few movies can top both the lists ofbest movies made of all time andmost boring movies of all time. A work of art must have greatness in it – a la “Moby Dick” – to produce such a polarity of opinion. It’s likely that many of those heretical people who find 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY boring have never seen it properly projected on the big screen and Christopher Nolan is trying to change that.
Christopher Nolan—an avid fan of 2001 ever since his father took him to see it at the age of seven—has been working alongside Warner Brothers to “un-restore” one of the most divisive films ever made.
What is an “un-restoration” exactly? Unlike many modern restorations which tinker or even correct past “mistakes,” Nolan wanted the exact opposite of a restoration, to return the film to the way it was projected back in 1968, the way he remembered it as a child.
Warner Brothers had begun the process of restoring the film in 1999, making interpositives (film stock that is essential in going from an original camera negative to a final print) from the original camera negative. Soon after seeing the major costs to restore a project like this, they put it on hold, leaving the reels in a Burbank storage facility where they’d wait until Nolan picked up the project.
Under the supervision of Nolan, the film lab began work on a deep clean of the film, spending six months polishing the fifty year old negative and fixing any past mistakes on the reel. Then using Kubrick’s original notes, Nolan’s DUNKIRK cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and a complex method of color correction to revamp the faded negative, the so-called “un-restoration” began.
“None of what we did was interpretive,” Nolan claimed toThe LA Times, further solidifying his idea that the best way to see a massive movie such as 2001, is exactly the way it was seen fifty years ago now, projected onto the big screen.
Nolan is not against the benefits of digital technology in restorations, but he still has a fondness for thepower of projection, emphasizing the power of understanding that “the same shadows the filmmaker saw are the ones you watch” in the theater.
And while 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was a childhood favorite for him, he urges audiences that it’s not about nostalgia, instead it’s the value of understanding a totally different way of watching a movie, one that is in danger of being lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1JIkK7-fUI
The 4k presentation of Christopher Nolan’s “unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY comes to the AFS Cinema this September. You can find showtimes and ticketshere.
This month’s ongoing Essential Cinema series, Pre-Code Treasures, looks back at the unique period of time (roughly 1929-34) before the implementation of the Hays Code. Each week, we’re joined by film scholars to talk about the era and the film selection for the week.
On August 9, scholar, professor, and film archivist Dr. Caroline Frick joined us to discuss “a funky artifact of its time,” the Marx Brothers’ THE COCOANUTS (1929), one of the early talkies that explored the transition of Broadway and Vaudeville productions to film. Lead programmer Lars Nilsen and Dr. Frick (a self-proclaimed Marx Brothers enthusiast) discussed many aspects of the movie including the Marx Brothers deal with Paramount, how cinematography had to change to adjust for sound, and a possible Austin connection between the famed Marx Brothers.
You can listen to the full conversation here, iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.
Our Pre-Code Treasures film series continues through September 2nd (buy tickets here). Dr. Caroline Frick returns back to co-host this Thursday’s screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s THE SMILING LIEUTENANT in 35mm.
THE THIRD MURDER, the newest movie from two-time Cannes Film Festival winner Hirokazu Koreeda (SHOPLIFTERS; LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON), follows the trial of confessed killer Misumi, a previously convicted murderer who has killed again and this time faces the death penalty. His attorney, Shigemori attempts to defend him from death but as he digs deeper finds that the crime isn’t as black and white as he once thought. A psychological deep dive into the mind of a killer, THE THIRD MURDER, is a gripping and eerie look at what it means to be guilty or innocent, and the lasting effects that can have on the people around you.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
“This mysteriously beautiful film, in Japanese with English subtitles, explores the elusiveness of motives, the nature of truth and nothing less than the justice system – the way it functions in response to an accused murderer who has already confessed and continues to insist he’s guilty.” Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
“What emerges is an inquiry not into the divine, but instead into the mystery of human existence.” Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice
“With a quiet, adamantly moral sensibility and unassuming yet exacting technique, he tells seemingly small stories that grow deeper and more emotionally complex one nuance at a time.” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Here at AFS, we’re big fans of Austin-based filmmaker and so-called “Godfather of Mumblecore” Andrew Bujalski. Later this month, Bujalski’s newest film SUPPORT THE GIRLS opens around the country, including at AFS Cinema. Our Lead Programmer Lars Nilsen recently sat down with the filmmaker for a conversation about living and working in Austin, his thoughts on Hollywood movies and whether or not we would ever direct a Marvel picture, what he makes of the word “mumblecore” nowadays, and why he will still drop everything to see a 35mm print in theaters.
And make sure to check out SUPPORT THE GIRLS, screening at the AFS Cinema starting August 24th. Andrew Bujalski joins us in person for a Q&A following the August 26th screening. Tickets and more information here.
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA opens this Friday, August 17th, at the AFS Cinema. Tickets are on sale now.
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s prolific career began as a member of the Japanese synth-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (as seen here on “Soul Train” in 1980). Sakamoto would soon shift his focus onto film scores, composing the acclaimed scores for MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE, THE REVENANT, and THE LAST EMPEROR, for which he earned an Academy Award for Best Original Score. With shooting spanning over five years, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA follows the musician as he navigates this period in his life including his diagnosis with stage 3 throat cancer, his anti-nuclear activism efforts following the Fukushima disaster, and his daily fascination with the sounds that are all around us and how their combination with synthetic sounds can make for a lasting musical impact.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
“The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.” Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
“The film serves as a stirringly poetic meditation on the pursuit of creation in the face of mortality.” Michael Rechtshaffen, The LA TIMES
“Stephen Nomura Schible’s documentary, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA” is not only a portrait of a great artist, but a sensitive and engrossing depiction of the act of creation and its process.” G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
Watch the trailer for RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA below:
