Black & White Movie Night: Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmush, 1984)

Sunday 6 March 2022, Black & White Movie Night: Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984), 89 minutes. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Masterpiece of modern independent cinema, this film is a black-and-white absurdist deadpan comedy starring jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint. It features a minimalist plot in which the main character, Willie, is visited by Eva, his cousin from Hungary. Eva stays with him for ten days before going to Cleveland. Willie and his friend Eddie go to Cleveland to visit her, and the three then take a trip to Florida. The film is shot entirely in single long takes with no standard coverage.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Black and White Movie Night: The General Line (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929)

Sunday 13 February 2022, Black and White Movie Night: The General Line, also known as Old and New, by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929, 121 minutes. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

100.000.000 peasants – illiterate, poor, hungry. There comes a day when one woman decides that she can live old life no longer. Using ways of new Soviet state and industrial progress she changes life and labor of her village. A young peasant woman (Marfa played by Marfa Lapkina) is striving for collectivization of farming in her village. In so doing she is confronted with resistance of the older farmers.
The General Line was begun in 1927 as a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, as championed by old-line Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. Hoping to reach a wide audience, the director forsook his usual practice of emphasizing groups by concentrating on a single rural heroine. Eisenstein briefly abandoned this project to film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, in honour of the 10th anniversary of the Revolution. By the time he was able to return to this film, the Party’s attitudes had changed and Trotsky had fallen from grace. As a result, the film was hastily re-edited and sent out in 1929 under a new title, The Old and the New. In later years, archivists restored The General Line to an approximation of Eisenstein’s original concept. Much of the director’s montage-like imagery—such as using simple props to trace the progress from the agrarian customs of the 19th-century to the more mechanized procedures of the 20th—was common to both versions of the film.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Black and White Night: One, two, three (Billy Wilder, 1961)

Sunday 28 november 2021, Black and White Night: One, two, three (Billy Wilder, 1961). Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30

C.R. “Mac” MacNamara is a high-ranking executive in the Coca Cola Company , assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, at Coca Cola Headquarters in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss’s hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind.
An expected two-week stay develops into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is so enamored of West Berlin: she surprises him by announcing that she’s married to Otto Piffl, a young East German Communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views. When the Southern belle is confronted about her foolishness in the matter of helping him blow up anti-American “Yankee Go Home” balloons (how the couple met) she simply replies with, “Why, that ain’t anti American, it’s anti-Yankee… And where I come from, everybody’s against the Yankees …”

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Black and white film night: M eine stadt sught einen morder (Fritz Lang, 1931)

M_Fritz_LangSunday June 26th 2016, Black and white film night: M eine stadt sught einen morder. (Fritz Lang, 1931). Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm. Free admission.

The horror of the faces: That is the overwhelming image that remains from a recent viewing of the restored version of “M,” Fritz Lang’s famous 1931 film about a child murderer in Germany. In my memory it was a film that centered on the killer, the creepy little Franz Becker, played by Peter Lorre. But Becker has relatively limited screen time, and only one consequential speech–although it’s a haunting one. Most of the film is devoted to the search for Becker, by both the police and the underworld, and many of these scenes are played in closeup. In searching for words to describe the faces of the actors, I fall hopelessly upon “piglike.” […Lees verder]

Black and White movie night: The Heart of a Dog (1988)

The_Heart_of_a_DogSunday May 29th 2016, Black and White movie night: Black and White movie night: The Heart of a Dog (Vladimir Bortko, 1988). 136 minutes, in Russian with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm. Free admission.

The film is set in Moscow not long after the October Revolution where a complaining stray dog looks for food and shelter. A well-off well-known surgeon Phillip Phillippovich Preobrazhensky happens to need a dog and lures the animal to his big home annex practice with a piece of sausage. The dog is named Sharik and well taken care of by the doctor’s maids, but still wonders why he’s there. He finds out too late he’s needed as a test animal: the doctor implants a pituitary gland and testicles of a recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal Klim Chugunkin into Sharik. Sharik proceeds to become more and more human during the next days. After his transition to human is complete, it turns out that he inherited all the negative traits of the donor – bad manners, aggressiveness, use of profanity, heavy drinking – but still hates cats. He picks for himself the absurd name Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, starts working at the “Moscow Cleansing Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds (cats, etc.)” and associating with revolutionaries, who plot to drive Preobrazhensky out of his big apartment. Eventually he turns the life in the professor’s house into a nightmare by stealing money, breaking his furniture, a water ballet during a cat chase and blackmailing into marriage a girl he met at the cinema. The professor with his assistant are then urged to reverse the procedure. Sharikov turns back into a dog. As Sharik he does remember little about what has happened to him but isn’t much concerned about that. To his content he is left to live in the professor’s apartment. […Lees verder]

Black and White movie night: La Vie de Bohème (1992)

La_Vie_De_BohemeSunday April 24th 2016, Black and White movie night: La Vie de Bohème (Aki Kaurismäki, 1992). In French with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm. Free admission.

La Vie de Bohème manages to mine more impact from the simple fact of movement than most movies can get even with a flurry of mobile shots and onscreen action. The title of the original novel translates to “Scenes from the Bohemian Life”, a title which could just as easily apply to a painting or set of paintings as it does to a film or collection of writings. Kaurismäki’s deep-focus shots are filled with the attention to detail and design that defines many of the greatest directors of onscreen comedy: Jerry Lewis, Frank Tashlin, and Kaurismäki’s contemporary Roy Andersson among them.

Unlike their color scenery and elaborate contraptions, however, (Andersson in particular is capable of a how’d-he-do-that craft in the tradition of stage magic) Kaurismäki’s compositions create the impression of a series of still lives in which his characters move tentatively about. The first shot captures the poet Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms) rummaging about in a heap of trash before he commits a violent pratfall, picking himself up with a bemused demeanor as he mutters about the predicament. What did he think would happen? […Lees verder]