Sunday, February 14
1:30 Frank Film. 1973. Directed by Frank Mouris, Caroline Mouris. 9 min.
Paris Is Burning. 1990. USA. Directed by Jennie Livingston. With Pepper Lebeija, Willi Ninja, Octavia Saint Laurent, Venus Xtravaganza. An intimate exploration of the fiercely competitive, wildly creative, and outlandishly extravagant world of Harlem drag balls. Outweek writes, “Paris Is Burning is that rare find: a documentary that combines drama, sociology, culture, and history into a powerful, passionate, and entertaining package…. A younger generation of gay black men have transformed their oppressive reality into an intricate world of glamour and fantasy.” Winner of the 1990 L.A. Film Critics’ Award for the Best Documentary and co-winner for Best Documentary at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. 78 min.
3:30 Colette. 1951. France. Directed by Yannick Bellon. 30 min.
Solzhenitsyn’s Children Are Making a Lot of Noise in Paris. 1979. Canada. Written and directed by Michael Rubbo. With Louis-Bernard Robitaille.
Solzhenitsyn’s Children was filmed almost ten years after the events of May 1968—the largest general strike in French history and the Soviet invasion of Prague. The structure is simple: with the aid of Robitaille, a French-Canadian foreign correspondent based in Paris, Rubbo visits with a host of French opinion-makers—journalists, writers, politicians, and philosophers who represent the vociferous, fragmented voices of the French Left, including a young and dazzling Bernard-Henri Levy. Courtesy the National Film Board of Canada. In French; English subtitles. 87 min.
5:30 Karl May. 1974. West Germany. Written and directed by Hans-Ju?rgen Syberberg. With Helmut Ka?utner, Ka?the Gold, Kristina So?derbaum, Mady Rahl. The film reflects its director’s now-famous obsession with the major figures who have shaped twentieth-century German history and consciousness. Karl May (1842–1912), a one-time convict, was the author of an enormously successful series of adventure stories of American Indians, but never visited any of the places he describes in meticulously accurate detail; he further blurred issues of fact and fiction, believing himself to be “Old Shutterhand,” the hero of his imagined tales. 187 min.
Monday, February 15
4:00 La Soufrie?re. 1977. Germany. Directed by Werner Herzog.
Lessons of Darkness. 1992. Germany/France/Spain. Written, directed, and narrated by Werner Herzog. (See Saturday, February 13, 7:45.)
7:00 Karl May. 1974. West Germany. Written and directed by Hans-Ju?rgen Syberberg. (See Sunday, February 14, 5:30.)
Wednesday, February 17
6:45 Domestic Violence. 2001. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. One of Wiseman’s most devastating and compassionate films, Domestic Violence centers on a Tampa, Florida, shelter for battered women and their children, and follows the police as they intervene—or find themselves powerless to intervene—in harrowing family disputes. The New Yorker critic David Denby observes, “Domestic Violence is a chronicle of victimization in which the women’s suffering is increased by their knowledge that they have been partly complicit in it…. But a termination point has been reached: the women in the shelter have left. The film is fervently devoted to the near-impossible act of walking out.” 196 min.
Wednesday, February 17
7:00 Domestic Violence. 2001. USA. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. (See Wednesday, February 17, 6:45.)
