Tag Archives: Laemmle Glendale

FELLINI SATYRICON

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This picture will be science fiction. You are astonished? But science fiction can be in the past as well as the future. This picture is a trip back to Nero’s time, and that means it is a trip into an unknown dimension. What do we know about the Romans? This has made problems for me. My other pictures have all been autobiographical to one degree or another… But now I must become detached, and that has been very hard work.

First I have to invent this world of Nero. Then I must see it from a very narrow point of view, so it will appear foreign and unknown. I am examining ancient Rome as if this were a documentary about the customs and habits of the Martians. To be detached from your own creation is unnatural—I must look on my son as a stranger…

Because the film is so detached, the sex in it will not be erotic. Everyone says Fellini is making a dirty movie. But everything will be abstract, detached. The sex in SATYRICON will be like those ancient Indian statues on the positions of love. Even as you see a woman kissing a monster, it means nothing, because it is so old, so far away, from another civilization…

If you see with innocent eyes, everything is divine… All artists are equal when they are themselves. — Federico Fellini

FELLINI SATYRICON

Wednesday, January 22, at 7 pm.

Royal

11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Pasadena 7

673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

Glendale

2017 North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.

Federico Fellini, Fellini Satyricon (1969), from top: Hiram Keller; Keller and Martin Potter (right); Mario Romagnoli (right); Fellini with actor on set; Fellini Satyricon; Capucine; U.S. poster; Fellini Satyricon; Keller.

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

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THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (2019)—Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ visual poem to a city they knew well, loved greatly, and lost to gentrification—is already a period piece; many of the locations depicted in the movie have been torn down since filming wrapped.

“There was a feeling growing up in San Francisco. There was the park where we met as kids, Precita Park, you’d see Filipino kids, Samoan, Latino, black, white. All hanging around each other, getting to know each other and dating across different backgrounds. And I think that San Francisco, I’m afraid, is on the verge of not existing, because so many of the people that we grew up with are being priced out of the city. And out of that sort of crossover, you have friendships like ours. So for one, I fear that the next generation won’t be making art like this. ‘Cause those friendships have to take form to produce that art.” — director Joe Talbot, to Jimmie Fails

This unmissable work—starring Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Danny Glover, Mike Epps, and Finn Wittrock—has been held over until late-August.

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

Through August 29.

Glendale

207 North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco, from top: Jimmie Fails; Jonathan Majors (left) and Fails; A24 poster; Danny Glover (left) and Majors; Fails, Majors, and Glover; Fails. Images courtesy and © the filmmakers, the performers, and A24.

FERRARA’S PASOLINI

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“I am a form, the knowledge of which is an illusion.” — Pasolini

From the distance of nearly forty-five years since his murder at the hands of a young Roman hustler, the public life and times of Pier Paolo Pasolini subsist like an Italian noir. The country’s “Years of Lead” from the late 1960s through the ’80s were marked by economic precarity, political savagery, and—for the urbane author and filmmaker—personal depression.

“To scandalize is a right. To be scandalized is a pleasure.” — Pasolini

In Abel Ferrara‘s elegiac PASOLINI—finally released after a five-year delay—Willem Dafoe is an uncanny visual analog for his subject. Burdened by presentiments of intellectual futility and struggling to find beauty in lost causes, Pasolini/Dafoe composes editorials, visits friends, gives interviews, and cruises the streets around Termini Station for company. A sense of defeat hangs thick in the air, and in the end the artist’s sense of aesthetics fell through the abyss. (Pasolini’s final film was Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.)

The other side of Ferrara’s film is his partial creation of the movie Pasolini didn’t live to shoot: Porno-Teo-Kolossal. These sections star Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s muse and goofball stud from Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, Teorema, Oedipus Rex, and The Hawks and the Sparrows.

PASOLINI

Through June 6.

Laemmle Glendale

2017 North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.

Willem Dafoe in Pasolini. The fllm co-stars Maria de Medeiros, third from top. Images courtesy Kino Lorber.

ORSON WELLES — THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

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Part Barefoot Contessa, part Nashville, part psychedelic head trip—a sixties hangover shot in the seventies, abandoned in the eighties, and finally edited down from over 100 hours of footage to a two-hour cut—Orson Welles’ final film, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, is a fascinatingly crass long day’s journey into night: the last fevered hours of Jake Hannaford, a past-his-prime Hollywood director played by John Huston with his signature leer and sense of exhausted disdain.

Surrounded by an entourage of enablers and trailed by a scrum of paparazzi and video documentarians, Hannaford makes his merry way out to Palm Springs to watch the rushes from his latest attempt at a cinematic comeback, which—as many early viewers have noted—plays like a Welles parody of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.

(The hyper-erotic film-within-a-film stars Welles’ partner Oja Kodar, and Robert Random—both frequently nude and both the objects of Hannaford’s obsession.)

Shot in multiple film stocks, this propulsive blend of coercion, abuse, and overwhelming cynicism teeters on and off the rails from its opening scene, but you won’t be able to divert your eyes from the action.

“More acutely than any other work attached to Welles, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is built—in form and content—of thrown voices, feints, false fronts, and tall tales leading to and from Welles’ idea of himself as a public figure, as the performance of a lifetime, drawn at maximum clarity then cracked apart and squirreled within shadows of such depth as to permit only flashes, glimpses, and whispers of that self-image.

“To be a wreck is, it seems, a certain sort of freedom.” — Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope.

Tonight, THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD—the Morgan Neville documentary on Welles and his struggle to make his last opus—will screen at LACMA. Tomorrow night at the same venue, producer Frank Marshall will present the Welles picture, followed by a Q & A.

(Later this week, Marshall will also present Welles’ film at UCLA.)

 

THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD

Monday, October 29, at 7:30 pm.

Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Tuesday, October 30, at 7:30.

Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Thursday, November 1, at 7:30 pm.

James Bridges Theater, UCLA, 235 Charles E. Young Drive North, Los Angeles.

 

Through November 8:

Noho 7, 5240 Lankershim, North Hollywood.

From Friday, November 9:

Glendale, 207 North Maryland Avenue, Glendale.

And on Netflix.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND features screen appearances by Mercedes McCambridge, Paul Stewart, Norman Foster, Susan Strasberg, Edmond O’Brien, Lilli Palmer, Claude Chabrol, Dennis Hopper, Stéphane Audran, Paul Mazursky, and Welles intimate Peter Bogdanovich, whose efforts in the assembly and release of the film were significant.

From top:

Oja Kodar(left) and Orson Welles (right) in the set of The Other Side of the Wind.

Kodar (2).

Robert Random and Kodar.

Credit for all images: Netflix.