Cinematheque Film Schedule

France | 1956 | Henri-Georges Clouzot

Pablo Picasso paints on “transparent” canvases (so we, positioned behind the works, can watch them take shape, almost like animation) in this unique art film that amply demonstrates the great artist’s fluid technique and fertile imagination. (He also talks about his work.) The 15 pictures Picasso creates during this movie were destroyed after the filming, so they now exist only in this documentary. Though a departure for director Clouzot, The Mystery of Picasso remains “one...

Canada, Spain, Sweden, United States | 2017-18 | various directors

The Sundance Film Festival's Short Film Program has long been the place to discover rising filmmakers of unusual talent. Alums include Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Damien Chazelle, Jay and Mark Duplass, Lynne Ramsay, Dee Rees, Jill Soloway, and Taika Waititi, among many others. Which director of the seven films in this year’s touring program will become the next household name? The program includes fiction, animation, and documentary, and features three Jury Award winners as...

USSR | 1966 | Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s long banned masterpiece was inspired by the life of a great 15th-century Russian icon painter. This sweeping biography finds the artist losing his will to speak and create after witnessing the barbaric horrors that infect his war-torn, feudal country. Can he regain his faith and voice? This new restoration preserves Tarkovsky’s preferred 183-min. cut of his film, 15-20 minutes shorter than the longest version available. Tarkovsky made all the cuts himself, trimming “overly long...

China | 2017 | Vivian Qu

Two pre-teen schoolgirls are assaulted by a middle-aged government official at a motel in a Chinese seaside town. Another young woman working the desk is the only witness to the crime (via surveillance camera). But will she report it? The aftermath proves as shocking and ugly as the incident itself in this searing, courageous critique of women’s status in contemporary China. “The perfect film for the #MeToo moment.” –IndieWire. Subtitles. DCP. 107 min.

USSR | 1966 | Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s long banned masterpiece was inspired by the life of a great 15th-century Russian icon painter. This sweeping biography finds the artist losing his will to speak and create after witnessing the barbaric horrors that infect his war-torn, feudal country. Can he regain his faith and voice? This new restoration preserves Tarkovsky’s preferred 183-min. cut of his film, 15-20 minutes shorter than the longest version available. Tarkovsky made all the cuts himself, trimming “overly long...

United States | 2017 | Paul Schrader

One of the must-see movies of the year! The spirits of Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, and Travis Bickle haunt Paul Schrader’s powerful and moving new film—an austere tale of a tormented priest (Ethan Hawke) in upstate New York who augments his own suffering by recklessly taking on the pain and obsessions of one of his parishioners. With Amanda Seyfried. DCP. 113 min.

Germany | 2017 | Rüdiger Suchsland

This eye-opening new documentary about filmmaking during the Third Reich boasts a wealth of film clips selected from the 1000+ feature films that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis produced between 1933 and 1945—musicals, melodramas, romances, costume dramas, and war films, some of them insanely lavish, all of them hewing to the Party line. This film provides a good introduction to some major stars (Hans Albers, Zarah Leander) and directors (Veit Harlan) you probably never heard...

Germany | 2017 | Rüdiger Suchsland

This eye-opening new documentary about filmmaking during the Third Reich boasts a wealth of film clips selected from the 1000+ feature films that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis produced between 1933 and 1945—musicals, melodramas, romances, costume dramas, and war films, some of them insanely lavish, all of them hewing to the Party line. This film provides a good introduction to some major stars (Hans Albers, Zarah Leander) and directors (Veit Harlan) you probably never heard...

United States | 2017 | Paul Schrader

One of the must-see movies of the year! The spirits of Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, and Travis Bickle haunt Paul Schrader’s powerful and moving new film—an austere tale of a tormented priest (Ethan Hawke) in upstate New York who augments his own suffering by recklessly taking on the pain and obsessions of one of his parishioners. With Amanda Seyfried. DCP. 113 min.

United States | 1915 | Lois Weber

The silent era’s two most formidable women directors are the focus of the first of five programs showcasing works by pioneering female filmmakers who have been largely forgotten by history. Lois Weber (1879-1939) was an actress who became the first American woman to direct a feature film and, later, the first American woman to own her own film studio. Her scandalous feature Hypocrites, about two men of God from two different historical eras who have...

United States | 1954 | Elia Kazan

Ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) locks horns with the corrupt boss of the NY longshoremen’s union in Elia Kazan’s powerhouse drama that won eight Oscars including Best Picture, Actor, and Director. Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb, and Eva Marie Saint co-star. Budd Schulberg wrote the script and Leonard Bernstein composed the music—his only all-orchestral score for a movie. 108 min.

Great Britain, United States | 1968 | Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s visionary sci-fi epic is also a visually dazzling meditation on human evolution. For most of its running time, it focuses on the crew members of an American spaceship as they battle loneliness and the supercomputer HAL on their way to Jupiter and beyond. “The ultimate science fiction movie.” –George Lucas. DCP. 139 min.

Great Britain, United States | 1968 | Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s visionary sci-fi epic is also a visually dazzling meditation on human evolution. For most of its running time, it focuses on the crew members of an American spaceship as they battle loneliness and the supercomputer HAL on their way to Jupiter and beyond. “The ultimate science fiction movie.” –George Lucas. DCP. 139 min.

United Kingdom | 2017 | Clio Barnard

The third feature from the director of The Arbor and The Selfish Giant is a free adaptation of Rose Tremain’s 2010 novel Trespass. Ruth Wilson plays an itinerant farmhand who returns to her family’s farm 15 years after fleeing it. Her abusive father (Sean Bean) has died, and she has come to claim the property as her inheritance. But her brother (Mark Stanley), who still lives and works there, has other ideas. “You can’t [look...

United States | 1915 | Lois Weber

The silent era’s two most formidable women directors are the focus of the first of five programs showcasing works by pioneering female filmmakers who have been largely forgotten by history. Lois Weber (1879-1939) was an actress who became the first American woman to direct a feature film and, later, the first American woman to own her own film studio. Her scandalous feature Hypocrites, about two men of God from two different historical eras who have...

United States | 2018 | Aaron Schimberg

Before he became a lawyer and law professor at CWRU, Charlie Korsmo abandoned a promising Hollywood movie career; he was the kid lead in such high-profile 1990s films as Hook, What About Bob?, and Dick Tracy. Korsmo returns to the big screen for the first time in 20 years in this adventurous new indie film from Brooklyn’s Aaron Schimberg (Go Down Death) that was one of the highlights at this past summer’s BAMcinemaFest. (Korsmo plays...

Canada | 1919 | David Hartford

Canadian-American actress/writer/co-director Nell Shipman (1892-1970) stars in this exciting silent-era blockbuster that was remade twice in Hollywood. Set in Canada’s remote and sometimes frozen north, the film tells of a tough, resourceful young woman living with her father in the woods when she is forced to fight off the sexual advances of a brutal villain. Preceded at 5:00 by ethnographic “fieldwork footage” shot by writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. It documents rural African American...

United States | 1941 | Howard Hawks

A rural Tennessee hell raiser turns choir boy and pacifist before becoming one of the most decorated soldiers of WWI in Howard Hawks’ rousing retelling of the life of Alvin York. Gary Cooper won the first of his two Oscars for this film that All Movie calls “one of the finest and most inspirational biographies ever committed to celluloid.” 134 min.

Brazil | 2017 | João Dumans, Affonso Uchoa

When a Brazilian teen discovers the diary of an incapacitated itinerant worker, he is transported (along with us) through a lifetime of people, places, incidents, and toil. This acclaimed Brazilian road movie, inspired by a James Joyce short story, is buoyed by a resonant folk/country soundtrack. “An instant classic…Marked by boundless humanism.” –Hollywood Reporter. Subtitles. DCP. 97 min.

United States | 2016 | Tristan Cook

In 2014, cellist Dane Johansen (now a Cleveland Orchestra member) walked Spain’s Camino de Santiago with his instrument on his back. He stopped in churches along the way to give recitals for other pilgrims and the locals. His long journey—and its attendant spiritual rewards—are explored in this documentary that has moved audiences at both the Cleveland Int’l Film Festival and the Cleveland Museum of Art. At 3:30, before the film, Johansen will perform selections from...

France, Switzerland | 1986 | Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Pierre Léaud stars in this made-for-TV rarity that was Jean-Luc Godard’s contribution to the French television series Série Noire, comprised of adaptations of crime novels. Godard’s movie, which is nominally based on James Hadley Chase’s The Soft Centre, emerges as something of a companion piece to his Contempt—a meditation on filmmaking, media, and adapting fiction for the screen, with Léaud playing a frustrated and frantic film director embroiled in the casting and financing of a...

Brazil | 2017 | João Dumans, Affonso Uchoa

When a Brazilian teen discovers the diary of an incapacitated itinerant worker, he is transported (along with us) through a lifetime of people, places, incidents, and toil. This acclaimed Brazilian road movie, inspired by a James Joyce short story, is buoyed by a resonant folk/country soundtrack. “An instant classic…Marked by boundless humanism.” –Hollywood Reporter. Subtitles. DCP. 97 min.

Hungary | 2016 | Roland Vranik

In this touching, timely movie that dramatizes the plight of refugees in present-day Hungary, a middle-aged African immigrant working as a security guard in Budapest falls in love with the fiftyish Hungarian teacher who is trying to help him pass the citizenship test. “Critic’s pick…A careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.” –NY Times. “The Citizen puts a very human face on a topic that has inflamed much of the Western...

United States | 2018 | Paul Weitz

A world-renowned soprano (Julianne Moore) who has traveled to a South American military dictatorship to give a private concert for a wealthy Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) gets caught up in a tense hostage situation. Renée Fleming provides Moore’s singing voice in this film version of Ann Patchett’s acclaimed, award-winning, best-selling novel. DCP. 102 min.

United States | 2018 | Paul Weitz

A world-renowned soprano (Julianne Moore) who has traveled to a South American military dictatorship to give a private concert for a wealthy Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) gets caught up in a tense hostage situation. Renée Fleming provides Moore’s singing voice in this film version of Ann Patchett’s acclaimed, award-winning, best-selling novel. DCP. 102 min.

United States | 2018 | Douglas Burke

Is this new movie the next The Room? It may be, according to Vice writer Grant Pardee. He calls Surfer “a fascinatingly absurd drama about a boy who must rediscover the courage to surf again with the help of the ghost of his father.” Writer-director-producer-composer Douglas Burke, PhD (who teaches physics at USC and lived in Cleveland’s Little Italy for a time) plays the film’s ghost dad (who’s made of squid ink, by the way),...

United States | 2018 | Paul Weitz

A world-renowned soprano (Julianne Moore) who has traveled to a South American military dictatorship to give a private concert for a wealthy Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) gets caught up in a tense hostage situation. Renée Fleming provides Moore’s singing voice in this film version of Ann Patchett’s acclaimed, award-winning, best-selling novel. DCP. 102 min.

United States | 1925 | Walter Lang, Dorothy Davenport

Prostitution is the salacious subject of this gripping melodrama that was co-directed by actress turned producer/director/screenwriter Dorothy Davenport Reid (aka Mrs. Wallace Reid). A huge box office hit, the film recounts the travails of a New Orleans streetwalker who also turns murderer on her way to redemption. Preceded at 4:15 by a 22-min. segment from Marion E. Wong’s all-Chinese feature The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With the West (1916), the...

United States | 1978 | Joe Dante

John Sayles wrote the witty screenplay for this crackerjack Jaws spoof, Joe Dante’s solo Hollywood directorial debut. In it, genetically modified, man-eating fish escape into a lake at a summer resort, terrorizing kids and vacationers. Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller, Barbara Steele, and Paul Bartel co-star. “A great modern horror movie with thrills, blood, laughs, and a cast picked to please the fans.” –Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. 95 min.

United States | 2018 | Douglas Burke

Is this new movie the next The Room? It may be, according to Vice writer Grant Pardee. He calls Surfer “a fascinatingly absurd drama about a boy who must rediscover the courage to surf again with the help of the ghost of his father.” Writer-director-producer-composer Douglas Burke, PhD (who teaches physics at USC and lived in Cleveland’s Little Italy for a time) plays the film’s ghost dad (who’s made of squid ink, by the way),...

Belgium, Italy | 2017 | Susanna Nicchiarelli

This unsentimental new film dramatizes the troubled final years of the German singer-songwriter who was once a glam Warhol “superstar” and vocalist for The Velvet Underground. Danish actress Trine Dyrholm is sensational as the aging chanteuse, pushing 50 and living in Manchester as she battles drug addiction and struggles to reconnect with her suicidal adult son while also embarking on a European tour. Some subtitles. DCP. 93 min.

Argentina, Dominican Republic, Germany, Qatar | 2017 | Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

A middle-aged Dominican man who works as a gardener for a wealthy Santo Domingo family returns home to his rural village when his father is killed by a policeman. Also an evangelical Christian, the gardener is unsettled by the poverty and pagan rituals he witnesses at home, and by his sisters’ insistence that it is his duty to avenge their dad’s unjust death. This simple story is embellished with ethnographic detail, stunning cinematic flourishes, and...

Argentina, Dominican Republic, Germany, Qatar | 2017 | Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

A middle-aged Dominican man who works as a gardener for a wealthy Santo Domingo family returns home to his rural village when his father is killed by a policeman. Also an evangelical Christian, the gardener is unsettled by the poverty and pagan rituals he witnesses at home, and by his sisters’ insistence that it is his duty to avenge their dad’s unjust death. This simple story is embellished with ethnographic detail, stunning cinematic flourishes, and...

Belgium, Italy | 2017 | Susanna Nicchiarelli

This unsentimental new film dramatizes the troubled final years of the German singer-songwriter who was once a glam Warhol “superstar” and vocalist for The Velvet Underground. Danish actress Trine Dyrholm is sensational as the aging chanteuse, pushing 50 and living in Manchester as she battles drug addiction and struggles to reconnect with her suicidal adult son while also embarking on a European tour. Some subtitles. DCP. 93 min.

United States | 1982 | Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty

At once horrifying and hysterically funny, this mind-boggling compilation of actual Cold War educational/training films, newsreels, and songs shows how the Bomb was sold to the post-WWII American public. This cult favorite has been called a nuclear Reefer Madness and a nonfiction Dr. Strangelove. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 88 min.

France | 1934 | Jean Vigo

French poetic realist filmmaker Jean Vigo completed only four movies—two shorts and two features—before his untimely death at age 29. But his two features have proved influential and immortal, and still turn up regularly on lists of the best movies ever made. L’Atalante, the second of these and Vigo’s final film, is a lyrical, romantic masterpiece about a barge captain who takes a wife. The bride comes to live with him and his salty, eccentric...

United States | 1987 | Kathryn Bigelow

Future Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) made her solo feature directorial debut with this handsome, stylish cult horror film that melds three popular movie genres: western, road movie, and vampire film. Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton star; Tangerine Dream does the music. 95 min.

France | 1934 | Jean Vigo

French poetic realist filmmaker Jean Vigo completed only four movies—two shorts and two features—before his untimely death at age 29. But his two features have proved influential and immortal, and still turn up regularly on lists of the best movies ever made. L’Atalante, the second of these and Vigo’s final film, is a lyrical, romantic masterpiece about a barge captain who takes a wife. The bride comes to live with him and his salty, eccentric...

United States | 1923 | Charles Bryant

Russian émigré Alla Nazimova, one of the greatest actresses of her era (and a pioneering bisexual), produced and stars in this opulent silent adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, about the seductive dancer who demands the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The fabulous décor and costumes are based on Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for the print edition of the play. “My own personal choice of must-see film [in the ‘Pioneers’ series]…Every minute is breathtaking.”...

United States | 1982 | Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty

At once horrifying and hysterically funny, this mind-boggling compilation of actual Cold War educational/training films, newsreels, and songs shows how the Bomb was sold to the post-WWII American public. This cult favorite has been called a nuclear Reefer Madness and a nonfiction Dr. Strangelove. Cleveland revival premiere. DCP. 88 min.