October 25th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
New York City's premiere resource for classic film screenings in the metropolitan area. Offering reviews, recommendations, venues and a host of links keeping classic film and the silver screens alive.
Halloween cinema finally begins to roll out properly in our movie-mad burg, but programmers have also made time to host Viking movies of the 50's and 60's, a WWI POW drama that Orson Welles called the greatest film ever made, and Otto Preminger's definitve work of 40's noir. New and continuing series today include MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film, BAM's returning Puppets on Film, Anthology Film Archives' Middle Ages on Film: Vikings!, the Rubin Museum's Cabaret Cinema, and the Film Society's Jean-Luc Godard shenanigans that refuse to ever end ever ever ever. The full rundown as follows;
Film Society of Lincoln Center
KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP (1987) Dir; Jean-Luc Godard
KING LEAR (1987) Dir; Jean-Luc Godard
TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (1966) Dir; Jean-Luc Godard
MADE IN USA (1966) Dir; Jean-Luc Godard
Film Forum
NOSFERATU (1979) Dir; Werner Herzog
MoMA
KNIFE IN THE WATER (1964) Dir; Roman Polanski
BAM Cinematek
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1985) Dir; Frank Oz
Anthology Film Archives
THE VIKINGS (1958) Dir; Richard Fleischer
THE LONG SHIPS (1964) Dir; Jack Cardiff
New York Historical Society
GRAND ILLUSION (1937) Dir; Jean Renoir
Museum of the Moving Image
HALLOWEEN (1978) Dir; John Carpenter
The Actors Fund Arts Center
CLUE (1985) Dir; Jonathan Lynn
Landmark Jersey Loews
BLACK SUNDAY (1960) Dir; Mario Bava
Rubin Museum
LAURA (1944) Dir; Otto Preminger
IFC Center
ALIENS (1986) Dir; James Cameron
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) Dir; Tobe Hooper
Nitehawk Cinema
THE EXORCIST (1973) Dir; William Friedkin
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971) Dir; Harry Kumel
Today's Pick? I think it's about time we got the All Hallow's Eve festivities in full swing, so I'm choosing from amongst the awesome fright flicks on display today, and as I won't be able to make it my Pick on the 31st itself (because for whatever reason programmers can't put two and two together on this one) I'm gonna choose a classic from one of my all-time fave filmmakers, John Carpenter's influential, iconic and still spooky as all bejeezus HALLOWEEN, screening at Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image.
Smartly leaning reductive in his contemporizing of the boogeyman bedtime story Carpenter employed what was perhaps his greatest asset, his style, in the service of convincing audiences that a force of pure unstoppable evil was stalking a sleepy midwestern suburb on the eponymous holiday. A cursory perusal of Carpenter's CV presents a director who prefers sparse dialogue in favor of visual storytelling, and in HALLOWEEN he lets the shadows do the bulk of the talking, Val Lewton-style. Once night falls the audience is constantly in fear of those shadows, and they become characters unto themselves, murky stand-ins for the predatory maniac cast in kitchens, garages and bedrooms, areas normally considered mundanely safe by movie audiences. Carpenter has pulled a Hitchcock, though, providing the audience with information (a killer on the prowl) that he keeps from his lead characters, so even the act of opening and closing the refrigerator door leaves us breathless. Carpenter's brilliant way with the widescreen lens ramps up the tension in these scenes simply by covering more area, providing more access for killer to victim. The boogeyman, truly, can be anywhere.
Easy enough to jump out and scream boo in the dark, perhaps, but here's where Carpenter's film elevates itself above other slasher flick trash; he creeps and scares the hell out of us in the daylight sequences as well, and in a couple of cases does nothing more than show a masked man merely standing in plain sight in order to successfully provide both heebies and jeebies. Carpenter understood he had to provide a terror inhuman, elemental, and dug deep not merely into the bedtime urban legend but the stuff of our bad dreams, and more than one sequence in the film has an undoubtable nightmare quality, a term mostly over-employed in the horror film genre but absolutely accurate when discussing this seminal 70's work of eeeagh! George A. Romero first brilliantly broke all the rules of horror filmmaking with 1968's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and the horror giants who succeeded in his wake during the Me Decade understood there was a craft behind this shredding of the social contract with the moviegoer, from William Friedkin and THE EXORCIST to Ridley Scott and ALIEN. Carpenter's boogeyman can freely leave your subconcious and stroll about in the daylight, stand stock still and stare at you even, and this might be even more terrifying than the realization he may indeed be immune to death.
For more info on these and all NYC's classic screenings inOctober '13 click on the interactive calendar on the upper right hand side of the page. And be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter! Back tomorrow with more of what ya love, til then stay safe and sound and look out for the next knucklehead too!
-Joe Walsh
