 Pratt Film Society
SPRING 2013 PROGRAM
The Pratt Film Society's Spring 2013 program begins February 5th at 5:30 PM in Higgins Hall Auditorium.
See you at the cinema!
 2/5/13
NOTHING BUT A MAN
Directed by Michael Roemer
(1964, U.S.A., 95 mins.)
A landmark independent film, NOTHING BUT A MAN was the first dramatic story featuring a largely black cast created for an integrated audience. Lauded by critics at the Venice and New York Film Festivals when it first premiered in 1963, this quietly moving, beautiful film remains as relevant and powerful today as it was then.
 2/19/13
BEIJING TAXI
Directed by Miao Wang
(2010, U.S.A, 78 mins.)
BEIJING TAXI is a timely, uncensored and richly cinematic portrait of China’s ancient capital as it undergoes a profound transformation. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of three cab drivers as they confront modern issues and changing values against the backdrop of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Through their daily struggles infused with humor and quiet determination, BEIJING TAXI reveals the complexity and contradictions of China’s shifting paradigm.
 2/26/13
FAKE IT SO REAL
Directed by Robert Greene
(2012, U.S.A., 95 mins.)
FAKE IT SO REAL follows a ragtag group of wrestlers in North Carolina over the course of a week leading up to a big show. The film explores what happens when the over-the-top theatrics of the wrestling ring collide with the realities of the working-class South. The wrestlers aren’t paid for their passion, but they treat wrestling like any artist treats their work. FAKE IT SO REAL shares the triumphs and heartaches of an often under-appreciated American art form.
 3/5/13
PUTNEY SWOPE
Directed by Robert Downey, Sr.
(1969, U.S.A., 84 mins.)
One of the coolest, craziest, and most consistently inspired comedies ever made, Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope is a hilarious and unhinged portrait of a Madison Avenue ad agency turned on its ear by the turbulences of the 1960s. An extraordinary send-up of the McLuhan generation’s conviction that the medium is the message, Downey’s 1969 masterpiece loots the entire cornball visual vocabulary of 1960’s television advertising in this non-sequitur-driven, relentlessly surrealist satire about the sudden ascension of a top ad agency’s token African American to chairman of the board.
--Chuck Stephens
 3/19/13
ABOUT SUNNY
Directed by Bryan Wizeman
(2011, U.S.A, 103 mins.)
About Sunny is the heartbreaking story of Angela Jerome (Lauren Ambrose, SIX FEET UNDER), a young single mother doing her level best not to fall apart. Her daughter Sunny is one of the few joys in her life, but raising a child alone is a struggle on even the best of days. When the worst week of Angela's life builds to a breaking point, she is faced with an impossible choice: keep trying to make things work, or let it all go for the promise of something better.
Pratt Film Society
FALL 2012 PROGRAM
The Pratt Film Society's Fall 2012 program begins September 9th at 5:30 PM in Higgins Hall Auditorium.
See you at the cinema!
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 9/18/12
SUNRISE
Directed by F.W. Murnau
(1927, Germany, 94 mins.)
One of the greatest of all silent films, Sunrise is a movie of extraordinary visual poetry and emotional purity. This universal tale of a farm couple's journey from country to city and back again was the first American film for F.W. Murnau, the German director of Nosferatu, whose everyday scenes seemed haunted by phantoms and whose most extravagant visions never lost touch with reality. Hollywood afforded him the technical resources to unleash his imagination, and in turn he opened up the power of camera movement and composition for a generation of American filmmakers. You'll never forget the walk in the swamp, the ripples on the lake, the trolley ride from forest to metropolis.
-- Richard T. Jameson
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 9/25/12
JOURNEY TO PLANET X
Directed by Josh Koury & Myles Kane
(2012, U.S.A, 76 mins.)
Eric Swain and Troy Bernier are scientists by day and amateur filmmakers by night. Over the years these two friends have turned out many of their own amateur, sci-fi inspired movies. Journey to Planet X follows the filming of Planet X, the duo’s most ambitious endeavor to date, and sheds light on their unique brand of “movie magic.” Eric and Troy are inspired by the transcendent nature of moviemaking itself, where the fantasies of being space travelers, charming leading men, and even successful filmmakers, all seem quite possible. Our documentary captures their struggle to realize their filmmaking dream.
-- Josh Koury and Myles Kane
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 10/2/12
SANS SOLEIL
Directed by Chris Marker
(1983, France, 100 mins.)
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and digital multimedia artist, challenged moviegoers, scholars, and himself for years with his complex essays about time, memory, revolutionary politics, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys around the globe from Africa to Japan and beyond. Marker passed away recently and we honor his legacy by screening one of his most profound and best-loved films.
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 10/9/12
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR
Directed by Jerry Lewis
(1963, U.S.A., 107 mins.)
Jerry Lewis's 1963 Jekyll and Hyde variation has always been tagged by two popular assumptions: one is that it is his best work as a comic filmmaker, and the other is that Lewis's Mr. Hyde equivalent--the slick, ultra-arrogant, good-looking womanizer Buddy Love--actually lampoons the director's former partner, Dean Martin. Well, The Nutty Professor certainly is Lewis's best film. But all one has to do is watch it to realize the motivation behind Buddy Love is more confessional: he's really much more like Lewis's darker, narcissistic side, while the shlubby scientist (also played by Lewis) from whom Love springs is closer to the star's screen image.
--Tom Keogh
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 10/16/12
YOU ARE NOT I
Directed by Sara Driver
(1981, U.S.A, 50 mins.)
A haunting adaptation of a 1948 short story by Paul Bowles about a woman who escapes from an asylum, You Are Not I played widely in the international film festival circuit in the early Eighties. Then, a leak in a New Jersey warehouse destroyed the negative, leaving director Sara Driver with only an unprojectable copy. Miraculously, a print was found among the holdings of Paul Bowles in 2009, and now the film has been restored. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive works to emerge from the post-punk downtown scene, the film was beautifully shot by Jim Jarmusch (who also co-wrote the screenplay) and features Suzanne Fletcher, Nan Goldin and Luc Sante.
-- Film Society of Lincoln Center
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 2/7/12
WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?
Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang
(2001, Taiwan, 116 mins.)
A young Taipei watch vender reluctantly sells a pretty Paris-bound girl his own watch, then finds himself longing for her, so much so that he begins setting the clocks all over the city to Paris time. Meanwhile, his recently widowed mother is looking for signs that her dead husband has returned to her. The director Tsai Ming-liang's haunting meditation on loneliness and time is a lovely, mordant piece of moviemaking. His immobile camera compositions and bare-bones use of dialogue allow the performers to play out their complicated emotional lives with a dramatic stillness and a dotty humor that is, at times, breathtaking. - Bruce Diones, New Yorker
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 2/14/12
DAMNATION
Directed by Béla Tarr
(1988, Hungary, 116 mins.)
In a small Hungarian town lives Karrer, a listless and brooding man who has almost completely withdrawn from the world, but for an obsession with a singer in the bar he frequents. Tarr’s immaculately photographed and composed film is about eternal conflict: the centuries-old struggle between barbarism and civilization. One of Susan Sontag's favorite films, this powerful work reveals the evolution of the cinematic method and dark metaphysical style that Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr made famous in Santantango and Werckmeister Harmonies. Black and white images seem to float out of an endless drunken dream. "Damnation is the ultimate film-noir, a deeply existential rumination on the miserableness of existence and the search for a meaning or a means of escape. - DVD Times
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 2/21/12
THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE
Directed by Goran Olsson
(2011, Sweden, 96 mins.)
The Black Power Mixtape1967-1975 mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish journalists who came to the US drawn by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Gaining access to many of the leaders of the Black Power Movement - Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver among them—the filmmakers captured them in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Thirty years later, this lush collection was found languishing in the basement of Swedish Television. Director Göran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover bring this footage to light in a mosaic of images, music and narration chronicling the evolution one of our nation's most indelible turning points, the Black Power movement.
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 2/28/12
THE COLOR WHEEL
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
(2011, USA, 83 mins.)
The Color Wheel is the story of JR, an increasingly transient aspiring news-anchor, as she forces her disappointing younger brother Colin to embark on a road trip to move her belongings out of her professor-turned-lover’s apartment. It can only be a matter of time before JR and Colin arrive at the strangest and most unsettling of resolutions and put to rest their decades of animosity, half-baked sibling rivalry and endless bickering. Resting uncomfortably somewhere between the solipsistic, unrepressed id of late Jerry Lewis, and the confrontational pseudo-sexual self-loathing of Philip Roth and shot on grainy 16mm black and white evoking the motels, diners and loners of Robert Frank’s America, The Color Wheel is a comedic symphony of disappointment and forgiveness.
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 3/6/12
DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT
Directed by Julia Loktev
(2006, USA, 91 mins.)
Writer-director Julia Loktev's harrowing, claustrophobic thriller Day Night Day Night plunges the audience into the world of a suicide bomber just prior to her final, fatal act. As the film opens, a young woman prays to an unknown, unspecified deity, then tucks away into a fleabag New Jersey motel room, when several hooded men arrive, arm her with explosives, and give her instructions to carry out. She then takes off alone, headed straight for Times Square, and making her way through clamoring throngs of real people. Loktev strips away much of the external exposition, never revealing the central character's name, ethnicity, religious affiliation or political background. The director thus forces the audience to focus, exclusively and unrelentingly, on the nature of the character's actions, and underscores the idea that terrorist motivations are, on some level, completely inconceivable to an outsider.
- Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide |
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 3/20/12
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS
Directed by Robert Hamer
(1949, UK, 104 mins.)
Director Robert Hamer’s fiendishly funny Kind Hearts and Coronets stands as one of Ealing Studios’ greatest triumphs, and one of the most wickedly black comedies ever made. Dennis Price is sublime as an embittered young commoner determined to avenge his mother’s unjust disinheritance by ascending to her family’s dukedom. Unfortunately, eight relatives, all played by the incomparable Alec Guinness, must be eliminated before he can do so. |
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 3/27/12
LE BOUCHER
Directed by Claude Chabrol
(1970, France, 88 mins.)
One of Claude Chabrol’s most acclaimed psychological thrillers, Le Boucher stars the director’s wife Stéphane Audran as Hélène, the repressed headmistress of a small village school. At a wedding, she strikes up a conversation with the local butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne), which leads to a hesitant, strictly chaste courtship, emotionally hampered not just by their social differences but by her memories of an unsuccessful past romance and his traumatic experience of conflict in Indochina and Algeria. Things come to a head when women are found dead in assorted rural pleasure spots, and Hélène has to confront the very real possibility that Popaul might be the murderer. But is it a case of mistaken identity? And even if he’s guilty, what will she lose if she turns him in? Chabrol’s control of this material is masterly, leading to a climactic confrontation that rivals anything in Les Diaboliques for palm-sweating suspense. |
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4/3/12
FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 4
Directed by Shunya Ito
(1972, Japan, 90 mins.)
An absolutely phenomenal surrealist-cum-exploitation picture, Female Convict Scorpion--Jailhouse 41 is the second in a series of films about Matsu (known to her fellow inmates as "Scorpion"), a diminutive but volatile woman who is wrongly sent to prison by a betraying boyfriend. Spectacularly photographed, these pictures feature an anti-heroine who is beautiful, strong, principled and basically honorable and decent--especially when compared to everyone around her. One of the truly genuine masterpieces of violent 1970s cinema, Female Convict Scorpion--Jailhouse 41 is, in its own way, as subversive as Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg's Performance, John Boorman's Point Blank and Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend.
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9/20/11
THE MISSING PERSON
Directed by Noah Bushel
(2008, USA, 95 mins.)
Writer/Director Noah Buschel’s third feature, The Missing Person, stars Michael Shannon as John Rosow, a private detective hired to tail a man, Harold Fullmer, on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles. Rosow gradually uncovers Harold’s identity as a missing person; one of the thousands presumed dead after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Persuaded by a large reward, Rosow is charged with bringing Harold back to his wife in New York City against his will. Ultimately Rosow must confront whether the decision to return Harold to a life that no longer exists is the right one. The Missing Person co-stars Academy Award Nominee Amy Ryan.
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 9/27/11
WINNEBAGO MAN
Directed by Ben Steinbauer
(2009, USA, 85 mins.)
Type "The Angriest Man in the World" into any search engine, and one name appears—Jack Rebney, a.k.a. "The Winnebago Man”—an ‘80s RV salesman whose hilarious, profanity-strewn, on-the-job meltdown was captured on video and passed around on VHS tapes, before exploding into an Internet phenomenon seen by millions. Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer goes in search of the infamous viral video star and discovers him living a hermit-like existence on top of a mountain, unaware of his fame. Rebney turns out to be as sharp-tongued as ever, but more intelligent and lovable than anyone could have imagined. An outrageously funny and unexpectedly redemptive tale of one man’s response to unintended celebrity, and proof that the truth is both stranger and funnier than fiction.
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 10/4/11
FISH TANK
Directed by Andrea Arnold
(2009, UK, 123 mins.)
British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for the intense and invigorating Fish Tank, about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia (electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), who lives with her mother and sister in the housing projects of Essex. Mia’s adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach a boiling point when her mother’s new boyfriend (a lethally attractive Michael Fassbender) enters the picture. In her young career, Arnold has already proven herself to be a master of social realism, evoking the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach; and she invests her sympathetic portraits of dead-end lives with a poetic, earthy sensibility all her own. Fish Tank heralds the official arrival of a major new filmmaker.
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 10/11/11
THE MUSIC ROOM
Directed by Satyajit Ray
(1958, USA, 10 mins.)
With The Music Room (Jalsaghar), Satyajit Ray brilliantly evokes the crumbling opulence of the world of a fallen aristocrat (the beloved actor Chhabi Biswas) desperately clinging to a fading way of life. His greatest joy is the music room in which he has hosted lavish concerts over the years—now a shadow of its former vivid self. An incandescent depiction of the clash between tradition and modernity, and a showcase for some of India’s most popular musicians of the day, The Music Room is a defining work by the great Bengali filmmaker.
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 10/18/11
FILM SOCIALISME
Directed by Jean Luc Godard
(2010, France, 101 mins.)
A symphony in three movements.
THINGS SUCH AS: A Mediterranean cruise. Numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday...
OUR EUROPE: At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
OUR HUMANITIES: Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.
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 10/25/11
THE WICKER MAN
Directed by Robin Hardy
(1978, UK, 88 mins.)
When a young girl mysteriously disappears police sergeant Howie travels to a remote scottish island to investigate. But this pastoral community led by the strange Lord Summerisle is not what it seems as the devout christian detective soon uncovers a secret society of wanton lust and pagan blasphemy. Starring: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee.
"The Citizen Kane of Horror Movies" -Cinefantastique.
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 11/1/11
SINGIN IN THE RAIN
Directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
(1952, USA, 103 mins.)
Considered by many to be the finest musical comedy of all-time, Singin' In the Rain is sheer delight. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote this wonderful film about the time when movies were changing from silent to talkies. The songs range from the hilarious "Make 'Em Laugh" performed by O'Connor, to the delicate "You Were Meant for Me" and the show-stopping classic "Singin' in the Rain" solo by Gene Kelly.
"Extraordinarily exuberant, always youthful, joyously indestructible. Enjoying Singin' In the Rain has nothing to do with nostalgia or with sentimentality. It is simply stated, a Hollywood masterpiece."- Vincent Canby, New York Times.
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11/8/11
UP & OUT
Directed by Christian Marclay
(1998, USA, 111 mins.)
In this feature-length video collage, Marclay uniquely couples work by Michelangelo Antonioni and Brian De Palma to create a new film, overlaying Antonioni’s 1966 masterpiece Blow Up with the soundtrack from Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller Blow Out. The photographer in Blow Up (played by David Hemmings) and the sound effects specialist in Blow Out (played by John Travolta) are both forced into forensic roles, as are the viewers of Up and Out who must use their wits to piece the images and sounds together.
Special thanks to Paula Cooper Gallery for making this screening possible.
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2/22/11
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